The Key to Getting Your Pre-foreclosure/short Sale Listings Closed

“Following Up” is your key to short sale success! Following up on every aspect of your short sale is one of the most crucial parts of a short sale.  If there was one thing that, above all, needed to be done well in order to ensure success, it would be following up.  Because a short sale has several different pieces that all come together at various points in time, it follows that there are many people and parties to follow up with as you work through the process.

Who are you following up with?

When working on a short sale, there are three main parties that you are involved with: the lender(s), the homeowner, and the buyer’s real estate agent.  At different points throughout the short sale process, you may need to follow up with one, two, or all three of these parties at the same time.  In the beginning it will primarily be the homeowner, however as the short sale continues to move along, you’ll be following up more heavily with the lender and buyer’s agent to keep the buyer in the loop with the status of the short sale.

The Three Parties…
You will be in direct contact with the homeowner to obtain the documents to send to the lender and you’ll also need to be in touch with them when it comes time to drop the list price on their home as well as when it comes time to close on their property.  It is also very important to stay in contact with the homeowner to keep them updated on the status of the short sale negotiations.

The lender is the primary party that you’ll be following up on from the beginning to the end.  From the initial call right up through closing you’ll be on the phone with the lender, always following up on your most recent fax, email or phone call.  Depending on which lender it is that you’re dealing with, you may be following up with any number of different employees throughout the course of the short sale.  You may find yourself calling customer service representatives, loss mitigators, set-up representatives, managers or supervisors, and occasionally collections.

When trying to reach someone directly, always be alert to the possibility that the person you are trying to reach is not the correct person to be speaking to.  It is quite possible that you received some misinformation and have been trying to reach the wrong mitigator.  Remember, you are dealing with employees that could care less or perhaps are completely clueless.  There have been a few instances where I was given a name and told that that a particular person was the assigned loss mitigator.  After three weeks of leaving multiple messages, I hadn’t heard a peep from the “supposed” mitigator.  In need of a definitive update, I called the loss mitigation department and spoke to a different person who told me that the file had been assigned to someone else.

Be prepared to do that yourself.  If you go a couple of weeks without hearing back from the person in question, try calling and speaking to the department of which your designated party belongs  to and clarify the situation.  If you speak to someone different, chances are they will clear up some misinformation that you had received prior.  Keep digging, and you will get to the right person.  And while there are some important matters to attend to regarding the homeowner and real estate agent, the lender is who you’ll spend 80% of your follow up time with.

Another important party to follow up with is the buyer’s agent.  They need to be updated on a constant basis, and it will greatly benefit you if they are well versed in short sales, because then they will understand the nature of the situation they are involved in and be able to reassure their client to be patient.  The success of the short sale, and its 100% conclusion, is based largely on the buyer cooperating and sticking around, and so you’ll want to make sure that you set their expectations very clearly from the beginning!
How to keep everyone updated without having to make follow up calls every single day….
The best way I found to cut down having to make follow up calls every day is an online short sale management tool called managemyshortsale.com. This has taken a huge weight of my shoulders because it allows me to keep everyone in the loop on what the status of my short sale negotiations.  As soon as I speak to the foreclosing lender and I update the account it automatically sends an email notification to every party involved in the short sale process (Homeowner, Buyers Agent, Attorney, Mortgage Broker, etc).

View more articles about the preforeclosure industry and investing in real estate at http://www.realestatebusinessmentors.com

Visit www.AskBobLachance.com for any short sale bank negotiating questions.