Case Study 2 - Building Rapport with Loss Mitigators

Short Sale Case Study on a Single Family house on West Kemper in Cincinnati

           A seller called us from our marketing and wanted us to short sale her house.  It was in decent shape but not a great location. We meet the women, gathered all the paperwork and faxed in our short sale package in early October. Every week, we called the bank, ACS (America’s Servicing Company). Every week they told us the file had not been assigned to a loss mitigator yet. They said that the files were assigned in the order they were received. This went on through December. Each time we called we spoke to someone new and gave us all different reasons and excuses for why the file had not been assigned. Finally, someone told us that the house had to be listed with a realtor for at least 90 days before they would consider a short sale. By now, it’s January and we got the house listed with a realtor but the Sheriff’s sale has been scheduled for February 4.

           Luckily, I had been working with someone else at ASC on some other files and asked him if he could take a look at this one. I let him know the sheriff’s sale was quickly approaching. I was careful at choosing my words telling him that we were not having very good luck talking with anyone about this and could he please help.

           I sent him an email with the information and some updated information on the other files he and I had been working on. I also faxed him a copy of the short sale package. He was able to get two of the four sheriff sales stopped.

           On this particular house, the appraisal came in at $95000. It was much higher than our offer. I have a realtor on my team, that is actually my business partner, and I had her list the house at $101000. If we can’t buy it ourselves, at least maybe we can get it sold through the MLS. We will only make a realtor commission but at least we were able to save the homeowner from foreclosure.  The bank wanted too much to do a double close so we couldn’t make any more money than just the realtor commission.

           If we had listed it for $106000, we would have gotten absolutely no activity, no showings, no offers. We had three other houses we were doing the exact same thing with but we had them reasonably prices. We got four or five offers on each house. It’s a pretty good strategy but they have to be priced right or people won’t look at the house. That’s the important piece, if it isn’t priced right it won’t sell.

             Actually, I called the day before the sheriff sale and spoke with two older women. One was the other’s boss and was trying to figure out what we needed to get the sale stopped. I explained to her that we sent our package in October, the homeowner has three kids, she’s moving out of the house, yes, she missed payments. But what can we do to just get this thing sold? Through no fault of ours, again I’m not trying to blame the bank, but through no fault of ours it just hasn’t worked out. We’ve done everything the bank asked us to do. We listed it as soon as we were told that it had to be listed for 90 days before they would consider a short sale. Unfortunately, it hadn’t been listed that long. I was getting nowhere with this woman so I asked to speak to her supervisor.

           This is always a viable option. You just need to pull it out at the right time and not make someone mad. You never know when you’re going to have to work with the same Loss Mitigator again. Just like the four deals I’m working on, where would I be if I made them mad at me? I got the bank to stop and consider these 4 offers by building rapport.

So, we did get the sheriff sale stopped because I built rapport with this Loss Mitigator. He was willing to work with me. I  kept him updated and he was very nice to me. And I told him he was and how nice he was to work with me. I should send his boss an great email telling him how much I appreciated working with him and how he made a difference about how I felt about working with that particular bank, especially because many others there were not very helpful.

Rapport is creating a relationship. This is not a bond where you go out to dinner on Friday night. It’s answering their questions, getting back to them in a reasonable amount of time with the info they need, and quickly returning their phone calls. All of these things lead to rapport. When you are running a business, you’ve got to have customer service or your business won’t last long. It’s a pretty easy thing to do.

If the voice mail says “I’ll be out of the office these days, please don’t leave duplicate messages”, don’t leave duplicate messages. And when they call you back, ask if they were on vacation or that you hope they were absent due to something fun versus anything bad. If it was a death in the family, show your condolences and then go on. Don’t ignore those little tiny things.

If their kids were sick, ask how they are now. Ultimately, leave this kind of information on their voice mail. Say things like I noticed you’re in Florida, I recognized the area code, how’s the weather? We’ve got six inched of snow here. People like to be talked to and you’re going to be nicest person they talked to all day. Everybody is doing their job and you’re the third party that’s non emotional about the house you’re buying. Remember that piece.

Now, what we typically do when we list a house is list it at the total of the first mortgage, second mortgage and the realtors fee. That’s if we want to show that it’s really listed but we don’t want to sell it because we want to buy it. We have an offer in so we show the listing as pending. We also have the homeowner sign two or three additional documents that allow us to drop the price about $10000 every three to four weeks. This way if we’re not getting any offers, it’s priced too high and we don’t have to go back to the homeowner to sign the new docs. We already have them. We just change the price in the MLS and see if we get any offers. That’s worked very well for us. It saves a lot of time, time we don’t have with the clock ticking towards the sheriff sale.

We know we’re not going to get rich on these realtors, but we have alternatives and options for these homeowners. We’re not just giving up on them. That’s really our goal and our purpose is to help these homeowners get out of their situation.

Learn how to successfully work with Loss Mitigators in The Short Sale Queen's Short Sale Success Systems Home Study Course.

This is a Short Sale Case Study from the files of the Short Sale Queen®.
Read Short Sale Case Study #3 and learn about Honesty with Banks in Short Sales

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