Davenport, FL Short Sales...Choose Your Agent Wisely, If You Don't, It Could Cost You

Riddle me this Batman...what has 3 months of wasted time, a frustrated buyer, a frustratedseller, and one really frustrated Realtor? If you said a short sale...ding, ding, ding! You are the big winner! I would love to tell you that I have a prize for you, but I really don't. You'll have to settle for hearing me rant for a while. LOL

I am representing a buyer on a Davenport, FL short sale. We initially got it under contract in February. By March the BPO (broker price opinion) was done and the case file had been assigned to a negotiator. At that time we were glad things were going along quickly. A title company is handling the processing of the short sale, and, at the time, I hadn't heard of title companies doing that yet. I figured, OK, let's see how this works, maybe it will make things easier.

The listing agent emailed and the bank gave us a net figure they would work with and the buyer decided to go ahead and raise his offer a bit so that we could move the deal along. Fast forward 3 months to yesterday. I got a call from the title company letting me know that the negotiator was closing the file because he never received a response to his request. Initially I thought there was just some confusion so tried to explain to the title company that we had a contract for the requested amount and that it is dated March 30th.

She was completely surprised by this. Apparently the listing agent never even sent the new contract to her. So here we are (seller, buyer, and me) waiting around wondering what is taking so long to get an approval since we already came up to the bank's terms. The whole time (3 months) I was getting regular updates from the listing agent about where we stand. OK, that's entirely accurate, I was regularly dragging updates out of him, but it's the same result. And the whole time he was feeding me a load of crap. He had no clue about where we were with the bank negotiator.

We got the negotiator to hold off from closing the file so we could try to get this deal back on track. He agreed, and went back to the drawing board. He came back to us and asked for another $3,500 because the sellers are not paying their HOA dues, and that obviously has to be paid, and it is eating into the lender's share of the pie.

At this point the buyer has decided to walk away from the deal, and I don't blame him. He has been waiting almost 6 months to close on this property, and would have if not for the miscommunication between the listing agent and the title company.

Short sales require attention to detail and organization. This could be a case of too many chiefs and not enough indians. But the moral of the story is...if you are selling a short sale, choose your short sale agent wisely. If you don't, it could cost you time and money.

If you need more information about selling your home as a short sale or would like my help, you can find me at Short Sale SuperStars.

Photo courtesy of Moria of Flickr.