Patrick Harvey

Just curious, what is your view on agents going into a pending listing? To me, pending listings are off limits. No agent belongs in there besides me or the selling agent.

Today I had an agent go into one of my pending listings and ... set off the alarm, of course. I'm gertting pretty fed up with agents seeing a sign on a property and just going on in, without the listing information, without knowing anything about the property. This seems like a violation of the code of ethics or something.

Anyone else have an opinion about this?

On average in the Phoenix area, a licensee closes two transactions a year. There are lots of licensees, and I know that about 5%-10% of them do the vast majority of the business. I am not sure where I rank in that list, but I do usually have more than 10 transactions either listed or in escrow.

So it is not trivial to keep track of them. Not hard, but not trivial, either. And during those fun times when I have more than 20 listings or escrows, it can get even more fun to keep track. We all have, or should have, systems for keeping track of such things.

There are a few things that really make me crazy. First, it is the never ending spew of ridiculous offers, usually at less than half of the listing price, some within the first week of the listing being active. And, these are not written on forms, they are just a letter of intent. I have to look at them, and I have to tell the seller about them. But I know what he will say.

To address this deluge of stuff I have to look at but which is a waste of my time, I have a new rule that my sellers agree with: Offers must be presented on Arizona association standard contract stock. LOIs will be ignored (I still have to look at them because sometimes there is a worthwhile offer that comes that way -- I guess -- I have never seen one).

Sometimes we counter these folks at twice the listing price. If you plan to make a silly offer, at least wait until the property has been on the market more than a week! Good grief.

The other thing that makes me nuts is when I get an offer that was scanned using a scanner made in the 1800s when they used candles, and ink made from the blood of newts. I'm not sure how they get digitized. These scans are crooked and illegible, often filled out in handwriting that no one cane read, and emailed from a transaction coordinator's email address that they never look at. The email never contains any information, like where to call or who the agent actually is.

I just got trhough trolling the MLS system for the variants of the scrawl of the agent ID and name to try and figure out who the buyer agent actually was, because I sent a counter offer to the transaction coordinator two days ago and heard nothing. And there was no phone number of course...

C'mon, is this REALLY how you want to represent your client?

I am in the middle of a short sale negotiation with a large lender. A really big one.

The way this short sale has gone, is like this:

First, they qualified for HAFA but it was denied because there wasn't enough in it for the lender. Ok, start over with the full new set of docs and try a regular short sale.

This short sale was approved, except the "mortgage insurance company" wanted a contribution. Except that there was no mortgage insurance company, this was an 80/20 loan, both with the same Big American Lender. So we went back and forth on this issue, then the file was assigned to a "special department that deals with these issues."

Then, suddenly, the first loan (that they claim had mortgage insurance) was service released to another servicer and ... we start the entire process again.

But the 2nd is still with the Big American Lender. And, now they are in a HUGE rush to get it done. They asked for updated documents, namely an IRS form and an affidavit, because the forms are now more than 90 days old.

I sent a long email explaining just exactly what the process was, and that I was working to get the resigned docs with new dates, one of them needed to have a loan number removed from it as well. Here, in this very post, is what the negotiator emailed me:

"I am worried, however, that the file will be declined again if I don't receive the 4506T and the *** SS Addendum and I'm sure you don't want that to happen again. This is ready to be submitted and they will not allow it to sit at this point. Please try to make the changes yourself. All I need is the date changed on the 4506T and the 1st loan # removed from the *** SS Addendum."

Really???? You want me to arbitrarily change signed documents??? I am just flabbergasted.

Goomzee is not a substitute for the MLS system.

Today I got a phone message that went something like this:

"Hi, Ummm, I was previewing your listing at xxx and apparently I set off the alarm. Just wanted to let you know."

Now a false alarm costs $100 or more, so I called up the agent and asked what happened (see there is an alarm sign in the yard and the MLS specifically says there is an alarm in the private remarks and in the MLS fields and the alarm code is in the DND field.

"Well I was just driving by and I thought I would preview it, and Goomzee said it was active, and it looked vacant, so I used my key and went in."

"Did you look at the MLS?"

"No, I just looked at Goomzee, and it said Active."

"Well now who is going to pay the $100 false alarm fee?"

....

C'mon guys, use some common sense. We do keep the alarms off during daylight hours, this was after sunset so the alarm was on...what are you doing previewing properties in the dark?

Am I out of line here? The seller has a beautiful home and wants to keep the alarm on all the time. Who am I to argue?

I have been on the buyer side of quite a number of REO transactions. But one I was recently working really got me going. The first clue is that instructions to the selling agent include things like "DO NOT EMAIL US ANYTHING RELATED TO INSPECTIONS, IT WILL BE DELETED."

Gee, I thought I had a duty to tell the seller's agent about what the buyer finds during an inspection. At least, I thought if the listing agent had access to information about a property that might affect a buyer's decision, they should at least let them know...

We dutifully wrote up the findings in a BINSR and submitted it to the buyer's agent, and they "never got it", we uploaded it into their system several times -- they "never got it". This seems to me to be a pattern of fraud, avoiding knowledge about a property (never mind they had someone in there to look at it, had the power and water on, had the property secured, etc. All of the people that did that, including the listing agent, have SOME knowledge of the property (like the fact that the roof is falling in)). But they want to avoid any knowledge of a property, apparently to the point of causing their listing brokers to commit fraud -- just my opinion.

In this case, somehow the FHA inspector got a copy of the home inspection, which resulted in a pretty unfavorable appraisal -- not in value, because the value came in right as expected, but rather in the conditions required by FHA prior to funding. All of them are health and safety issues. Of course the listing broker is very unhappy, and probably the lender, because now they must disclose all they know about the property to subsequent purchasers.

The listing agent told me the property could go homepath, they will fund anything (and if you read previous posts I have written, you will notice that Homepath does not require any appraisal and frequently finances properties at a value much higher than where it might apprasie -- more than 10% higher, in one case. This might raise property values in the short term, but is a real disservice to buyers!)

I'm sure I will get some strong comments from REO agents, (BTW I am also an REO agent). If we want to keep this an ethical business, we have to stop playing games like trying to avoid learning anything about the properties we are representing. It is what it is, an REO agent or seller pretending to not know or engaging in deceptive practices, does not change the condition of the property, but it might open up a huge area of liability.

Just stop it!