Short Sale Realtors: Bloomfield / Birmingham / Novi / Troy / Rochester / Beverly Hills / West Bloomfield / Franklin / Royal Oak / Huntington Woods / Oakland County / Detroit Metro Area The Mike Realtor Team! : Birmingham MI Equator Bank Of America Short Sale Log Troy Real Estate Agent

That's a great timeline and review. Any competent manager looking at the bank's confusion between their Titanium and REOTrans operations would be pulling their hair out after reading this. Great stuff.

Dave,  the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing.  In fact the right hand and the left hand are not attached to body anymore.

Mike

It sounds normal for a Bank of America short sale account.  Accept for the length of time, that seems short.

Tim,

I do think that in the Detroit Market, banks are very fearful of foreclosing on a Michigan home.  Between the 6 months of redemption, plus 3 months of pre-foreclosure loan mediation, harsh winters and low sale prices. 

Bank of America, as well as other lenders, just would rather short sale the home compared to waiting 12 months with no loan payments to find a home with frozen pipes, thousands of tax liens and no buyers.

Short Sale do move a little quicker here if you are diligent.

Mike

Mike, 

  I think this is great information to share for all parties involved in a short sale. It is eye opening..

I've place all my B of A sales with Titanium whether a lead from them or not and paid 25% referral fee, even on the listings I obtained on my own for their services. I've been a Titanium HRC for two years. HOWEVER, they are great at wringing out money. After paying $100 to join them, the 25% referral on sales, they now want us to join RES.net for $250 in order to be considered for REO's. I'm going to have to 'hold my nose' to keep working with Titanium.

It'll be interesting to see what Obama's pressure for more short sales actually does.  The Prez doesn't have a good record with loan mods.

Equator, the "fast system".  I have been trying to get a package to show up in the old fax system, since January and be assigned with no luck, faxing small portions at a time.  Finally, on Monday talked with Nickolas at BOA,  who took pity on me and with a three way call to owner who gave permission, Nickolas  entered it into the Equator system. Called Equator on Tuesday, talked to Billie who  said Freddie Mac loans are not handled by Equator and that he had to remove the deal from the system as declined.   Wednesday, I tried to input the deal into Equator, it would not let me.  I called Equator and they informed me I have to wait until it is officially declined on Thursday(Billie told me to resubmit on Wednesday) and that I might be able to resubmit on Friday. The entire process begins again, with the owner having to call in and authorize me to work the deal.   But, the real news was that Equator does handle Freddie Mac and it should have never been removed from the system.....BEWARE OF BILLIE. Even though I begged for help, because the property is going to Sheriff Sale, I have to work the system and then request a postponement. Is this what Bank of America calls an improvement?????  What a waste of my time! 

Update!   The Equator process that was started correctly on Monday, incorrectly removed by Billie on Tuesday, should have been available to re-submit on Thursday but still in the system waiting for "decline" status before it can be re=entered in the Equator System. Friday's excuse was that the person assigned to remove the file and classify it as declined is at least one day behind.  One whole week wasted, hours of my time trying to correct the problem all because the Equator employee was not properly trained for the product he represented.  All this and the proerty is a week away from the Sheriff Sale. 

Just makes me wonder how many times during the approval process I will be told the short sale has been declined.?????

UPDATE:   Three and a half hours on Tuesday with Equator and Bank of American, talked to  five different reps, one was unlucky enough to get me on the phone twice.  Still, the short sale has not been officially declined.  The Sheriff Sale is Tuesday, but, no one can postpone the sale until the deal is removed from Equator.  At this moment, Wednesday 9:30am( I have been on the phone since 8:13am) I am waiting for someone in BAC foreclosure department to pick up my call.  What a nightmare.  I have wasted so much time trying to fix this problem...and so have so many others at BAC and Equator....everyone has sent "escalations" requests yet, here I am still trying to get help.  Ah, Stacy just came back on the line and is going to call Orlans, the attorney, to verify they have received the request to postpone the Sheriff Sale.......This process started 10 days ago. Now 9:40am....still on hold.  Updates later..... 

All I can say to this is AMEN! Have sold one short sale listing 4 times in the past year, 3 times getting NO approval from BOA, once with NO approval through Titanium. Account has now been switched to Equator. I can't wait to see how this one plays out.

Stomach is churning just thinking about all the wasted paper,  time, energy, anger, false elation, et al concerning these NON-sales. I don't know about you but if anyone says "we need to wait for the process"  or "it should only take 8 to 10 business days for review" to me one more time.....I will explode!

That's an amazing timeline you should frame it or something. I got an offer on Short Sale with BofA back in Oct. Feb 3 they let me know it would be serviced by Titanium. A month later and I'm still getting the we didn't get all docs requested. However, it all arrived together labeled numbered and I have the fax confirmation. I guess they toss it at the desk and whatever sticks gets uploaded. I'm sure their overworked and underpayed, but geesh could you just not take a file from A to B a couple time and see how it works.

Wow...tenacity seems to be the theme with getting short sales approved.  I have gotten a couple thru with B of A but lots of hardache & redo's but that was to be expected with this territory.

One think that works is to email all parties from the equator system.  Some times you will get a call back from someone.  I recently email all parties and the supervisor for my file was out of town, so I got a email back saying that she was out of town and that two other supervisors were covering her while she was gone.  The email gave me their name and numbers.  Well I called them both and they both called back!!!!

Since was on a file that had not moved in 3 weeks, it was 60+ days old and was on my 3rd negotiator 2 weeks.  So after I spoke to one of the covering supervisors, (who explained what was the reason for the delay) then he email our negotiator direct, cced me on the email and in less then 12 hours, the negotiator gave me a counter and the file is moving.

Then the supervisor called me again 5 days later and just see if everything was still moving.

Moral?  find the person who cares.  It is not easy but BOA has people who really care about your short sale.  You just have to find them.

Mikr

I did a short sale with B of A in the same timeframe as you at the same time.  Offer accepted by seller in Aug and closed in Jan, Both loans with B of A. However, I did not put it on Equator and was not contacted by Titanium so I guess we got lucky.'

marcy

My Bank of America short sale experience has been quite interesting.  I am currently processing 2 short sales with them and have found that I have to call multiple times in a day (To verify info given on a file. All customer service reps are NOT created equal!). 

The first home was in foreclosure status and had been assigned a sheriff's sale date.  I uploaded to Equator.com on 5/12 and a day later, received an offer, submitted the offer only to have the system reject it, saying the offer was not high enough.  I did this 3 times until Equator deleted the file 4 days later because of the number of attempts.  I then called in to BOA to find out what was going on and why the offer had been rejected.  After talking to about 15 people who looked no further than the surface of the problem, I reached someone who looked into the issue for me.  He explained to me there was no BPO amount in the system for the computer to make a decision based off of.  Regardless if I would have entered the entire loan amount, Equator would have still rejected the offer saying it wasn't a high enough offer.  This representative went ahead and initiated the file again for me and opened it back up, stating that he was going to request a manual review and to call back in 7 days for an update.  Needless to say, the manual review never happened and the file was kicked out of Equator again.  I called back and explained the situation and convinced the rep that the file needed to be assigned to a negotiator and to bypass the inital Equator offer process.  This is when things started rolling!  I was contacted by email by a BOA negotiator and all of my documents were requested in PDF format.  I emailed the documents and 2 days later, I receive a call from an appraisal company requesting to schedule an interior appraisal.  Appraisal complete.  Now I'm simply waiting for the report to get back to BOA.  To make a long story short it took me nearly 6 weeks and countless stalking phone calls to get the ball rolling with BOA. If you stay on top of the file and call routinely just for an update and speak to as many people as you can, you get somewhere.  You cannot depend solely on Equator, I use Equator and I call each week.

On my FHA file that BOA is servicing, the process has been beyond smooth.  I sent docs on 6/2, the file was notated as complete by 6/17, appraiser conducted an appraisal on 6/21 and we're just waiting on the numbers to get back to BOA.  I've emailed my negotiator on this one before she made contact with me just to let her know that I was available if needed.  I plan on emailing her weekly.

All of this to say, you cannot simply put a package together and send it in and that be the end of it; follow up is the key.  If you're not checking up on the file, BOA certainly is not either.

Kaci J.

Kaci@KaciJ.com