Bank of America Short Sale Process Still Taking Time for Brookline Home Owners

Initiating a short sale can be an experience with a whole host of emotions. Every bank’s short sale process is a bit different. And of course there are likely hundreds of Quincy homes for sale that are already on the market making it that much more difficult.

Total time frames can significantly vary, even from what the bank is telling you. However, below is, as of today, a little bit of insight that Quincy home owners facing foreclosure will find usefull.

From my experience Bank of America takes the longest to process short sale documents, with the possible exception of Bank of the West and Washington Mutual/Chase. Bank of America processors are still seeing a 7-15 business day time frame for document imaging.

Until the short sale documents are imaged the property will be displayed just as a past due account. You may receive several phone calls from the collections department during the short sale process.

My personal interactions with Bank of America have led me to believe that the collections departments are not always 100% current on all short sale information. Unlike some of the other banks, as of today BOFA does not require you to call to initiate the short sale process.

In order to start the short sale process they just require a valid 3rd party authorization, short sale package, and purchase agreement to be on file.

If a representative does contact you, as the homeowner, it is always best to report this interaction to the representative that is handling the short sale for you. This individual is usually your real estate agent or loan negotiator.

From speaking with hundreds of short sale processors there seems to be a general consensus that Realtors who check short sale status on a daily basis are slowing the whole system down.

For example, after speaking with one specific senior level negotiator he explained that 6 hours every day is spent giving ‘no-movement’ status updates to Real Estate agents. Apparently, if everyone just stayed quiet and listened the process would actually be miles per hour quicker (like hundreds of).

One thing, as of today, that is informative is the fact that according to Bank of America short sale policy once a ‘Phase I’ negotiator is assigned the short sale file, they have 7-15 days to respond before the file can be escalated to a supervisor. Now, solely based on ‘rumors’ I’ve heard that some Realtors huff and puff to the processors about the file not being processed fast enough in this phase.

Unfortunately, according to Bank Of America processors this only prolongs the file. What happens is the impatient agent usually tries to get the file reassigned. Unfortunately, every time a ‘escalation or reassignment’ is requested this starts the 7-15 processing response time over again.

Now, there is an appropriate time for escalations (i.e. after 15 days), but anything before that with Bank of America could just prolong the whole processes.

 Print This Post