My Short Sale Finally Closed

The long and painful process to disentangle myself from the albatross that was my previous home finally came to a close last week.If you’re interested in the whole story, I wrote about it on my family blog at The housing bubble hits home for the Stankavich family and Short Sale Auction for my Previous Home. Then I got an email from my real estate agent late last week. The buyer received a Notice of Default from my mortgage lender in the mail and was concerned. So I called the lender and asked if it was a matter of the payoff and the default process crossing in the mail. The call center rep  told me that the loan wasn’t paid off yet. Naturally, I asked why not. The call center rep said that they didn’t receive guaranteed funds so they hadn’t deposited the check from the title company and closed the loan. At this point my frustration level took a sharp turn upward. I asked the rep if they had notified the title company. She said no. I very nearly lost it. I started to read the riot act to the phone rep, then thought better of it. I told her that I was extremely frustrated, but that it wouldn’t solve the problem to take out my frustration on her. Let me tell you, that took some serious restraint. They were just letting the check sit there, doing nothing, and had no intention of contacting the title company to resolve the situation. Unbelievable.  I was able to get the title company on the phone with the lender and negotiate a resolution. We’ll find out if everything went through cleanly later this week.

Once everything is completely wrapped up I’ll share more details of the timeline, the dollar amounts, and generally how everything played out. Despite the frustrations, some things did go well. I built a great business partnership with Dianne and Jeff Yake from Easy Street Real Estate.  If you need a real estate agent in the Portland, OR metro area, I definitely recommend Dianne. She has spent a lot of time learning about short sales over the last few months, and she has real world experience to go along with the training. I also found Richard Geller’s Mortgage Relief Formula very helpful. I picked up a lot of good information about short sales and short sale auctions from Richard’s website and ebook.

I hope to be able to truly call this done by the end of July. It’s been a long time coming – two years since we first listed. If you’re interested in the wrap-up and hearing more thoughts about real estate, technology, and business development, subscribe to receive future posts by RSS feed or email.