First, just a quick reminder that……
CELL NUMBERS GO PUBLIC NEXT MONTH. All cell phone numbers are being released to telemarketing companies and you will start to receive sales calls……You will be charged for these calls. To prevent this, call the following number from YOURcell phone: 1/888/382-1222. This only takes a couple of minutes to do and it blocks your number for five (5) years. Remember, you must call from the cell phone number you want to have blocked.
I don’t know about you, but I’m on the phone enough to not have to get calls from marketers too!
Onward….
A few weeks back, I entered a blog about how badly Bank of America has screwed up their loss mitigation & short sale process. And I’m here today to say, the saga continues. In fact, now they’ve added a web-based file-builder of some kind in which the REALTOR enters in all of the homeowner’s data and uploads the pertinent docs for the short sale. Bank of America claims that this process will reduce approval-time to 2-3 weeks, start-to-finish. The site went live last Monday and at first glance, there are signs that they still don’t “get it”. (I’ll only touch on one very significant point here, since I want to get to the good news…..Wells Fargo, that is.) When you begin entering the data for the short sale file on the site, it asks for your realtor’s license number. Well, did they ever think that not ONLY realtors conduct short sales?? Apparently not. So, since my company is a 3rd party company, with no realtor’s license, we were stuck before we started.
So, you would think you could just call Bank of America for some guidance. No. When BofA was called, no one there even knew the site existed, and after almost 1 hour to find someone that DID know of its existence, we were told we had to call the 3rd party company running the site and collecting the data for them. WOW, now that’s service! After another lengthy period on hold with the website company, it was finally determined that the license number “doesn’t matter” and you can put anything in this field. Once that was done, it was another very cumbersome 1-1.5 hours of building the file for Bank of America. I really don’t want to go any further. They suck. If we ever get to a point where short sales get approved by Bank of America within 2 weeks of submission, I’ll eat my words on this blog. By the way, does that include or is that AFTER the 3 weeks it takes to get an authorization on file?? No one knows.
Then, there’s Wells Fargo, the diamond in the rough. I had a client call our office last week on Wednesday, at 3:30pm mind you, with their scheduled foreclosure sale date set for the next Tuesday, tomorrow, asking if it was too late to stop the foreclosure and do a short sale. Of course, the first thing I asked was, “Who’s your lender?” When the answer was Wells Fargo, I said, “Let’s roll!” The client had the docs faxed to me by 5:30pm that afternoon. We spent about the next 2 hours doing the research on the property and putting the short sale file together. The authorization to release was faxed at about 6:30pm, and the remaining docs were faxed to Wells Fargo at about 8:30pm.
I figured, at best, I’d call the next morning, Thursday, and just let them know that the authorization was on the way with the short sale package right behind it,and that I’d have to wait until, say, Saturday for them to get the docs, hope to get a loss mitigator assigned to the file by Monday, and pray they would stop the foreclosure in time. BOY, was I wrong! I called Wells Fargo at 7am THE NEXT MORNING, confirmed the homeowner info, and get this, THEY ALREADY HAD THE AUTHORIZATION LOADED, ALL OF THE SHORT SALE DOCS HAD BEEN RECEIVED, AN ORDER TO POSTPONE THE SALE HAD ALREADY BEEN PLACED, AND THE FILE WAS IN QUE FOR A LOSS MITIGATOR TO BE ASSIGNED!!! I had to run through it all twice with the rep on the phone, splash cold water in my face to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, then ask the rep one more time, just to be sure!
I couldn’t believe that less than 12 hours after the 50+ page fax was sent, Wells Fargo was knocking it out!! I called my clients, and they were ecstatic that they had a shot at avoiding foreclosure, and remember, so did the lender….a win-win, maybe.
Hey, Bank of America, take a lesson. If you could just get your documents into the system, that’s all we’re asking at this point, baby steps, get the docs into the system, then you might find that more short sales will ultimately get processed and approved, meaning that LESS money is lost by your investors due to the unnecessary forelcosures.
But, I know, to do that would mean you’d have to put some of the BILLIONS you received from the government into equipment, hiring, and OMG, training people, leaving less money for bonuses! Oh yeah, I forgot. What was I thinking?!?!
Maybe, hopefully, the new BofA CEO will see the light. Don’t let the door hit ya, Ken.
I can’t say I agree with everything you’ve said here, but at least you wrote it well, unlike lots of crappy bloggers out there!
That’s OK…you don’t have to agree. I’ll take the kind words! Have a great one!
Thanks, Valarie! We will be providing more content on a regular basis. I look forward to your comments! Have a GREAT day!