Update for 6/26/2009

June 26, 2009 · 6 comments

Here’s my end-of-the-week update on all our houses…it’s a quick one, but after this long, long week, I don’t have a lot of energy to write…

House #1: The Corn House

Nothing new with this house…just looking forward to collecting our third (on-time) rent check…

House #6: The Red Garage House

I’m so angry that it’s difficult for me to write this without screaming at my monitor. It’s now been over 6 weeks that the buyer’s loan has been in underwriting!

But, that’s not what I’m angry about…

We completed the second appraisal last week, and it came back above the purchase price, so we were confident that we had cleared that hurdle. In fact, the head of underwriting told us that once the appraisal was approved, we should get a clear to close on the sale. Today, at about 6pm, we received a call from the loan processor, who had just spoken to the underwriter…

Apparently, the appraiser that the mortgage broker used for the second appraisal wasn’t approved by the lender, and therefore the appraisal isn’t acceptable! Yup, that’s right…we wasted 2 weeks and $400 on an appraisal that we can’t use. And had it been done properly, we’d be scheduling the closing right now.

I haven’t yet gotten a hold of the broker, but when I do, I’m going to spend a long time chewing him out. Hopefully we’ll be able to get another appraisal done next week, and still get this thing closed. Okay, I need to stop writing about this, as I’m just getting more and more angry…

House #8: The 16-Bid House

It’s now been nearly 15 weeks since we got this one under contract to buy, and we still don’t have a closing scheduled. The title company has given up on trying to get two liens cleared from the title, and have passed the issue on to Fannie Mae, who is now working on getting the title cleared.

We got very frustrated with this one earlier in the week, as the listing agent and the title attorney were ignoring our calls. So, we started calling their bosses (including the head of a relatively big brokerage around here), and started making waves. We likely pissed off some people we probably shouldn’t have pissed off, but I don’t really care. There’s just no excuse for ignoring a customer, even when it comes to high-demand products like bank-owned foreclosures.

Ultimately, we extended the contract again, this time through July 27. I have a feeling the listing agent and the title company would prefer if we just asked for our deposit back and walked away, but I’m not giving them the satisfaction. They need to put up with me until they get this deal done or until they cut me loose.

House #9: The Hat Trick House

This one has been on the market for a couple weeks now, and while we’re getting some traffic, we haven’t yet gotten any offers. It’s listed a little bit high, and I’d like to drop the price, but I’m waiting until we get some closure with The Red Garage House (which is in the same neighborhood) before dropping the price.

If we can get The Red Garage House closed with our buyer, we’ll immediately drop the price on this one to try to get a quick sale, but until we have some closure on the other one, I’m holding off.

House #10: The Deja Duplex

This one is sold

House #11: The Sunglasses House

We closed on this one earlier in the week, and renovation is underway. Thursday was spent doing mold remediation, including a bunch of demo of drywall and other moldy surfaces. On Friday, we had the HVAC ducts cleaned to remove any residual mold, had some structural work done on the front and back decks, and started demo on the interior.

I’ll have some pictures next week, but suffice it to say, the house looks a lot different (and a lot better!) than it did just 2 days ago.

House #12: The Mini House

As I mentioned last night, we’re completing a survey of The Mini House to determine if it is actually in a flood plain or not. I’ll have more to say next week, but according to the surveyor, it looks like part of the property will definitely be in a flood zone, but the actual living space may not be. This would still require us to get flood insurance, but the cost should be dramatically less than if the entire property were in a flood plain.

I’ll know more over the weekend, and will write more next week…

That’s the scoop for this week…have a great weekend!






6 responses to “Update for 6/26/2009”

  1. Bilgefisher says:

    Keep up the pressure on those houses. You know far better then I do that folks take the path of least resistance and as long as your not it, you will come out ok. If folks at the bank were competent we wouldn’t be able to pick up great deals on REO’s.

  2. J Scott says:

    Bilge –

    Agreed…I just wish I knew what to do…I’m definitely open to suggestions on The 16-Bid House…

    According to the title attorney, it’s in the hands of Fannie Mae now, so I’m not even sure I could contact the person who’s dealing with it.

    But, you bring up a great point that I need to keep bothering people, if only to make myself feel like I’m accomplishing something! 🙂

  3. Bilgefisher says:

    I really don’t know of a good way to get through to Fannie. I think its almost like trying to work with the credit agencies. You have to keep trying numbers and doing google searches for numbers until you find the right person. Chances are if you are very friendly with someone at Fannie they will get you to the right person or dept. Might take 15 different calls though.

    This got me thinking though, I imagine you spend a bunch of time doing these “reminder” calls. Would this be a task to hand off to a virtual assistant if you give them a proper script? Have you VA email daily to let you know the progress of his/her contact with each company. All you have to do is scan your emails. Just an idea.

  4. J Scott says:

    Great suggestion, in theory…

    I tried the VA thing for a month back in May. After 30 days of having the service (and paying for it), I used it exactly 0 times.

    I found there to be a few problems:

    – First, I’m too much of a control freak (need to work on that issue)
    – Next, I found that many of the tasks I would otherwise farm out required a good bit of specific RE knowledge that my VA didn’t have
    – Lastly, not knowing if I’d have the VA long-term, I didn’t take the time to actually transfer over any significant amount of information so he could help me

    I’m positive that had I been more creative and spent more time working on it, I could have found the VA service to be at least partly useful. But, I didn’t make enough of an effort.

    With my wife due to give birth in September, and her spending A LOT of time dealing with RE paperwork and marketing, I think we’re going to hire a part-time on-site assistant to help with stuff like this. Hopefully, having someone on-site and who knows a little about RE will work out better than the VA.

  5. Jingle says:

    I’m glad I don’t have to contend with much mold or flood plains…. what a pain in the rear. I once had a house under contract for over 5 months which had title problems. The listing realtor was an old woman who had been in the biz for about a hundred years and would never return calls, one of the worst I’ve ever dealt with, and an amazingly abrasive personality on top of it all! I was determined not to let the deal go, and run rough shod over this women; I lasted for about 3 months. I finally came to the conclusion, neither she or the house were worth the amount of grief and time it was causing me, mostly grief just dealing with her. It is a good thing I finally relented. Now, over 2 years later, the house is still empty, still bogged down with title problems. I would have had a heart attack by now dealing with that old biddy! My conclusion after this heart burn: There is always another deal, and some deals just are not worth it. Real Estate is a business of disappointments.

  6. Alex says:

    What is the issue! If there is a lien on the property somehow find out who has the lien! It might sound useless but trust me its worth it. If the bank is incompetent you might as well try and do there job for them…if you really want to get this place…

    I wonder…you’ll probably spend more time babysitting Fannie Mae or the title company while they get rid of the lien instead of just doing it yourself.

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