Love's Real Stories

You can’t fight City Hall. You can’t fight Citibank, either; or Bank of America; or any bank, for that matter. Not when it comes to short sales, anyway. If you happen to find yourself in a short sale, you’ll have a fight with a bank, alright, but all you can actually do is beg. You’ll become frustrated and angry. You’ll probably find yourself saying, “I hate the bank!” or “How can they treat us like this?” You might think that aggressive action will get results, but you might as well get in a bare-knuckle match with a brick wall. The bank is big. The bank is indifferent. You’re puny. In the end, you’ll wind up like all the contestants before you. You’ll be on your knees, begging the big bad bank for mercy.

Why is this so? In a short sale, the seller and buyer of a home must wait for the bank to accept less than it is owed because the house is being sold for less than the loan against it. “Wait for the bank” is an understatement. Buyers have seen their kids grow up and leave home while waiting for the bank. Realtors have suffered cauliflower ears and physical atrophy from phone-sitting, waiting for the bank.

The bank’s method for granting acceptance is to implement a regimen of slow, tedious torture. They lose paperwork, demand ever-increasing stacks of forms, never communicate, and withhold acceptance. The bank hides behind “Asset Managers” (underpaid, uninformed underlings), who systematically ignore the desperate struggles of their victims.

Enter the California Association of Realtors (CAR). CAR conducted a “Short Sale Satisfaction Survey” of its 150,000 Realtor-strong membership. The results not surprisingly, show overwhelming dissatisfaction. Realtors cite “unresponsiveness, onerous procedures, and long delays” in the short sale process, not to mention high rates of blood pressure, migraines, and divorce.

CAR is fed up with the banks, and has decided to do something about it. What are they doing? They’re begging, of course.

That’s right. CAR published an “Open Letter on Short Sales” in major newspapers up and down the state, calling on the banks to have mercy on us all. In the letter, CAR President Beth L. Peerce says, “Short sales can play an important role in our state’s economic recovery by accelerating the pace of home sales and reducing the inventory of bank-owned homes on the market. Banks get a nonperforming asset off their books and avoid the headaches associated with disposing of properties they don’t want to own in the first place.”

Ms. Peerce urges the banks to “standardize and streamline” the process, and to “increase staffing with the goal of eliminating service issues.” Then she points her verbal finger at them and says, “Poor and slow service has only exacerbated the problem. Horror stories abound from potential homebuyers and Realtors forced to wait 90 days or more for a response, or being required to fax short sale applications or other paperwork as many as 50 times.”

CAR is a powerful organization with lobbyists and political liaisons that have access to high places, and when President Peerce speaks, people listen. But when it comes to short sales, the banks might as well be on another planet. CAR is reduced, like the rest of us mere earthlings, to one option:

Begging.