Imagine you're having dinner at a restaurant. You've finished your meal and are awaiting for dessert when your cell phone rings. So, you excuse yourself from the table, grab your cell and head out to the parking lot to talk. When you come back to your table, everybody is gone, the table is cleared, and the waiter elbows you to ask: "Do you have a reservation?"
You wonder if this is the Twilight Zone. You say, "I just want to eat my apple pie." No, the waiter says you must call a special 800# and make a reservation. Then, they will want to confirm your credit card number before seating you at another table. They also cannot bring you a slice of apple pie unless you order an entire dinner. The waiter acts like you are a complete stranger. He's never seen you before.
If this really happened, you would never go back to this restaurant again. Yet, this happens almost every single week to this Sacramento short sale agent.
Doesn't matter whether it's a Chase short sale, Wells Fargo short sale or a Bank of America short sale. Most of the major lenders handle short sales in a similar manner. Once a buyer cancels, the short sale starts over. Oh, Bank of America says it will do a soft decline, but that doesn't help much if the BPO has expired. It certainly doesn't help if the negotiator hits the wrong key, which instead results in a hard decline.
You think that short sales can take a long time to close because you see for sale signs in the yard for months on end or 3-digit numbers for days on market, but that's not always the lender's fault. Much of the time it's because a buyer canceled. Maybe the buyer canceled because the buyer wanted attention for a while. Wanted people to fawn over him or her, but perhaps the person had no real intention of buying a home. In states outside of California that kind of behavior would be labeled as some type of mental deficiency or handicap but here in Sacramento it seems to be par for the course.
So, we resubmit the short sale and start the short sale process anew. We shake hands and introduce ourselves to the bank one more time. Here's our authorization to speak to you, even though you already had one in the file that you deleted. You know, this is nuts. A soft decline should result in a complete file transfer, leaving only the purchase offer slot empty. But no, this is short sale land, in which every day is a new opportunity to encounter fresh madness.
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