We are on the verge of closing a short sale escrow and how they came up with this term is a wonder. I realize it technically means that the bank agrees to accept less than the seller owes, that's fine. But "short" certainly does not mean short "time".
For example take our short sale from hell. We opened the escrow in October last year. We have been going round and round with them, let's call them bank X, ever since. In another week that will make 8 months.
First it was the asset management company that X hired to clean out these problem mortgages. That experience was agony. Our 'rep' was a bill collector. He harangued, belittled, yelled, and threatened just as if we had defaulted on a car payment. For weeks on end something extra had to be performed before they would agree to close ___ some new form, a "missing" doc (which had been sent three or four times), a new rule the bank had implemented. Everything was our fault, or the buyer, or the seller, or the buyers agent. The asset management rep never erred. This went on for months.
Finally, I gave up screaming at him and called bank X directly.
Despite the encouraging sign of actually speaking to a pleasant human being this did not turn out well. Each person who answered was apparently transferred the next day to a different desk because not only were no calls returned but "that person no longer works here" and "no, I do not know where he/she is now". It even got to the point where, if I got demanding, the person would give out a phone number that when dialed, yielded "we're sorry, the number you dialed is no longer in service."
At the last, just this week, I finally landed a "team leader" at bank X who assured us she had not only the power but the desire to wrap this up. When I asked for her phone number (my caller ID showed 972-526-0000) she explained she was training people and had no assigned desk or phone. And when I called the main number nobody knew where she was or how to leave a message. I did eventually have someone else call us to say that she was out on vacation and that he would be happy to finish what she had begun. Unfortunately however he had reviewed the file and discovered many and several errors in it that prevented him from signing off on it. The entire deal would have to be done over again from the top down.
This is a dark, black hole. Living things get sucked into this and are not seen again, at least in their normal, healthy state of mind. We in the business have heard horror stories about short sales and now we are come to believe them. My hope is that is was just this particular bank in our case. That other banks are organized and actually motivated to sell a home that is in distress.
There is no explanation I can offer to explain why a bank or asset company would intentionally stall and prevaricate as they both did with us. I can imagine the asset rep being on commission and trying to glean every nickle out of the deal but why purposefully delay every single step? It did indeed seem premeditated and to the detriment of every one ___ the sellers, the buyers, the agents, even the bank. I keep seeing our billions in bailout money floating in and out of their windows and wondering why they can be training and no one is learning anything.
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