Realtor's video gets BofA's attention By Rick Rothacker
rrothacker@charlotteobserver.com Posted: Thursday, Mar. 17, 2011 
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More Information
- Realtor vents frustration
- Want to watch?
Here's a link to Leigh Brown's video:
Outraged at Bank of America's attempt to secure a home that she had already sold, Concord Realtor Leigh Brown turned to YouTube and Twitter this week to vent her frustration.
She gained the attention of more than 1,700 Internet viewers, and the Charlotte bank is now eager to apologize to the Indian Trail homeowners.
"I had no idea that I would get so much attention," Brown said. "It's the closest I've ever been to going viral."
The posting is the latest difficulty for Bank of America's mortgage unit, which is still struggling with the fallout from the housing bust and the bank's troublesome 2008 purchase of Countrywide Financial.
The Realtor's online rant also shows how social media can sometimes be a quicker way to get a large corporation's notice than more traditional means.
The problem started after Brown, a real estate agent with Re/Max Executive Realty, represented a client selling a home via a "short sale." This is when the bank and the seller agree to the sale of the home for less than the balance owed on the mortgage to avoid a foreclosure sale. Bank of America was the servicer.
The sale closed on Jan. 27, and the first-time homebuyers, Kacie and Christopher Justice, began moving in. Six days later, on Feb. 2, they noticed unfamiliar men outside their home taking photos.
They wore black shirts with images of handguns on the front and the word "Agent" emblazoned on the back, Kacie Justice said. Their truck was black with tinted windows. "It was just scary," Justice said.
The men said they were there to perform work on a foreclosed home - on orders from Bank of America. The tasks included removing furniture and capping some exposed wires. The Justices explained they were the new homeowners, and that the home had been a short sale, not a foreclosure.
The men agreed to leave, and the Justices were quickly on the phone with their real estate agent, Shirley Ghorshi. She assured them that they had not bought a foreclosed home but wanted to make sure there wouldn't be any more surprise encounters.
"What if they hadn't been there?" said Ghorshi, an agent with Exit Realty South. "I don't know what means they would have taken to trash it out."
Ghorshi called Brown, and she began calling and e-mailing her contacts at Bank of America. She said she didn't get a call back until a Saturday afternoon three or four weeks later. Brown didn't have the file on the sale immediately available, so the bank representative wasn't able to help.
Then, "out of the blue," she said she got a call on Tuesday. It was the bank checking up on the situation - more than a month later. "The annoying part to me was that he was basically not all that surprised," Brown said. "He basically said, 'This happens.'"
That set off Brown, who told the bank representative that she planned to take the story to social media. She asked a colleague in her office to film her diatribe with a hand-held camera and posted it on YouTube.
In the darkly lit video, Brown gives an animated recounting of the homeowners' encounter with the crew and the belated phone call she received that day from Bank of America.
"The man wasn't surprised about the fact that people came to the house to trash it out after closing," she said, wagging her finger at the camera. "I asked him, 'Should people be hiring security guards if they purchase a Bank of America short sale?' Bank of America said, 'It's not a bad idea.'"
Bank spokesman Rick Simon said the incident occurred because the division that handles short sales hadn't notified the field services unit that maintains homes - typically ones in foreclosure or in other distressed situations - quickly enough. The home had been referred to the foreclosure process but hadn't been foreclosed on, not unusual in short-sale situations, he said.
The bank had inspected the vacant home earlier in January and submitted an order to have materials removed from the home, including perishable food and gasoline. Even though the short sale had already gone through on Jan. 27, the bank proceeded with a work order approved Jan. 31.
"Unfortunately, the system at field services did not reflect the change in ownership until Wednesday (Feb.2), the same day the crew showed up from the vendor," Simon said.
After the bank was notified of the problem, it made sure all work orders had been canceled, Simon said. The bank attempted to reach Brown on Feb. 9, he said, but didn't get a call back. Brown said she didn't hear from the bank until the later Saturday afternoon.
Simon said the incident was a "fairly rare situation." According to an investor presentation this month, the bank's short sales and so-called "deed-in-lieu" transactions have been steadily climbing since 2008 to more than 20,000 per quarter. The bank, Simon said, wasn't sending workers to "trash" the home but to deal with safety issues. "It's work if we didn't do it, we would get faulted for it," he said.
Hours after posting her video, Brown said she got a call from someone at the bank in Charlotte who wanted to address the problem. The bank's social media monitoring team had seen her video. "He was anxious to get a hold of the buyer's agent and make it right," she said.
Bank of America has more than a dozen people around the country who surf social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube for issues related to the company, said bank spokesman Joe Goode. They interact with customers and, when needed, connect them with appropriate contacts offline. The bank has had positive results working with customers who prefer to communicate via these channels, he said.
In the Justices' case, Bank of America plans to apologize to the homeowners and the agents, Simon said. Kacie Justice said she had a voice mail from the bank Thursday and plans to call back.
In the video, Brown said the homeowners made sure someone was at the house 24 hours a day in case a crew returned. Justice said it hasn't been that extreme. "We didn't try that hard, but we tried to make sure someone was there," she said. "It was something we kept in mind."
Justice said she liked Brown's video and got a chuckle from her dramatic presentation.
"I'm glad she did it," she said. "I don't want this to happen to anyone else." Staff writer Tommy Tomlinson contributed.
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