Short Sale success GMAC and Greentree

So as you can see from my last few posts, my team has had some recent short sale success with BofA, GMAC and Wells. Those banks, despite being the largest and the busiest, are actually helping people move on with their lives, by approving massive amounts of short sale requests. We have also had recent success with HSBC, Wachovia and Indymac, while avoiding banks like Greentree and US Bank, because of the scary things we read about them. We have had first hand experience with a US Bank short sale denial and can say that they are just not helping Americans. On the other hand, since we have never worked with Greentree, we are pleasantly surprised to report that we have just achieved short sale success with them and have learned a great deal in the process. For those who do not know, Greentree is a hybrid. They are like a collection agency with a bank charter, so they kinda make and follow their own rules. The key to beating them of course, is persistence and escalation. We started this short sale on Jan 12th at 10am, with the standard faxed authorization. GMAC and Greentree both had negotiators assigned quickly and the BPO's done within 45 days, however, after no response from either bank for over a week, we escalated to management for help. We found out that GMAC doesn't give you access to a manager and Greentree management calls go straight to voicemail, which is always full. Better yet, they are not allowed to respond to emails, so now what? Well my team spent some time doing their usual research to find an executive within each bank who would want to know about these useless delays. Well sure enough, once our emails were read by those executives, we had responses very quickly. Sad that it took an executive to make these files move, but it is a common approach in getting short sales approved. Anyway, both bank negotiators were not happy with us after that and still tried to delay the files a little longer, but we soon had very clean approvals on our desk and all of this within 94 days. Whoo Hoo! So Congrats to Dan and Melissa, they are already working on repairing their credit and moving on with their lives!

US Bank, do they deserve that name?

US Bank seems to be a great bank right? They have good rates and returns on their checking, savings and cd's, they do a lot of lending to California state employees and to those with great credit, they have very friendly staff and do seem to have a lot of locations here in the Sacramento area. However, let's peel back the onion and take a closer look at their practices when one of those good borrowers defaults on his home loan. So our client is a state employee who had his special project and OT income cut. Since the California budget is going to be in a deficit for a long time, his income issues are clearly not short-term. We got all of his income, asset and debt figures together, ran the numbers and saw that we had a viable short sale candidate. Not only was he struggling financially, but he was upside down on his home $100k, was short $1k per month on his debt to income ratio and only had 1 month of emergency funds available to him. Like many Americans he was literally living paycheck to paycheck. So we submitted the packages to both of his lenders (Citi and US Bank) and had an approval from Citi Bank within 45 days. Great news right? Nope, we got a request from the US Bank negotiator to provide more documentation on the income and debts, as they believed the home to be affordable to our client. Also, they were not even close to issuing us an approval because our seller was current on his payments. How can that be, he stopped making payments 4 months ago? Nope again, turns out that US Bank was deducting money from all of his checking, savings and misc. other accounts to pay the second mortgage on time. To be fair, many banks will do that to get their payments and I believe they can do it legally. OK, so here we are 4 months into negotiations and US Bank has officially denied our short sale request, 3 different times! They said they did not participate in the TARP bank bailout, so they owed us and our client nothing, were not being forced to help any homeowners by the US Gov't and would make every attempt to collect on the debt, no matter what. WOW! So their official explanation for denial number 1 was that the home is affordable for our seller. Their excuse/suggestion for denial number 2 was that our seller can afford the home and should get a tenant in the home to help offset the loss and to help him pay the monthly mortgage. Excuse number 3 was that he borrowed the money and needed to pay it back, period. Needless to say, our seller is more than angry at both US bank and our team for not helping him. The home is going to foreclosure in only 12 days and US Bank will get $0 instead of the $10k we offered them. Bad business decision in my opinion, but that's why I am not a bank executive, as they must know something I don't, right? So the question remains, as a member of that bank or as an investor in that institution, how many times are they going to say no to short sale requests and then make expensive attempts to collect from the sellers before it starts costing you (the member) money? They are going to or already have, increased the monthly fees on checking and savings accounts and ATM withdrawals, and/or increase their lending rates to members, all in an effort to recoup their short sale losses! Investors do your homework before jumping in and homeowners with US Bank equity line loans, keep up with your payments and if you are struggling, be sure to seek the advice of an attorney or very skilled short sale agent who can explain your options!

Short Sale success with Freddie Mac, BofA, BofA and UGI

As the title suggests, this was a loooong battle that included a lot of different moving parts. Yes, you read that correct, there was a BofA first servicing for Freddie Mac, a BofA home equity line and a mortgage insurance policy with UGI, against the BofA home equity loss. Wow my head hurts just writing that! OK, so the key to our success was perseverance. We continued to make calls and send emails to all necessary negotiators and managers on a regular basis and when they would not respond with the answer we needed, we escalated past them. This is a little more difficult because of Equator, but the twitter team is a great resource. This sale was started in January and finally closed April 30th, but before that it was denied in early March by Freddie Mac due to insufficient offer. We begged the buyer to raise their purchase price and they did, so we started over again and had an approval from Freddie Mac within 4 weeks. To our utter disgust, the insurance company (UGI) then denied it in early April, also due to insufficient offer. In their case it was not actually the offer, it was the amount of loss and lack of contribution from Freddie Mac. Since Freddie is that stubborn rich uncle we all love to hate, we avoided them and instead escalated to Sr. Management at BofA, demanding that they contact Sr. Management at UGI and negotiate an approval. When that did not happen, we simply sent an email to Sr. Management at BofA and cc'd Sr. Management at UGI, explaining that the two companies needed to come to a reasonable solution on the loss and issue an approval quickly. Since everyone involved could see each others email addresses, we revealed the wizard and eliminated all of the excuses they were making about not being able to reach a decision maker at UGI. In the end it worked because here we are 4 months later with a successful short sale, a happy client who avoided foreclosure and a happy new buyer. We are doing our part to help get this economy going again! Thank you Adam, you know who you are and congrats to Brad and Marti!