One of the top mistakes realtors make while handling short sales is getting mad or upset at the lender or the loss mitigator when things don’t go the way the agent would like them to.
Picture this – a football player takes the ball and runs the wrong way to the opponent’s goal line. When he crosses the wrong goal the referee of course signals a safety, not a touchdown. So the player has scored 2 points for the other team, not 6 points for his team.
Now imagine that the player gets mad at the officials for his boneheaded play. Is there anyone who would feel bad for this player who obviously doesn’t understand the rules? Or wouldn’t we instead feel badly for the referee who is being yelled at? If a player chooses to play the game, yet doesn’t know the rules of the game, that’s his fault, not the officials.
Likewise with agents, if we choose to play in the short sale world, but don’t know or understand the rules of the short sale world, and how the game is played, what is the point of getting upset with lenders and loss mitigators simply because we don’t really understand how short sales work?
So very often I talk with a fellow Realtor who tells me how angry they got with a loss mitigator. They will say how they were on the phone yelling at the loss mitigator. This simply shows that the agent doesn’t understand the short sale process. It also makes it very unlikely that deal will ever close!
One time after an agent told me how they had screamed at a loss mitigator, I said “That probably didn’t help much did it?” She responded “No, but it sure made me feel better.” I then said “Wouldn’t a nice commission check feel even better than that?” She agreed.
Particularly when we are dealing with the large national lenders, they are bureaucratic by nature. They have a process for short sales, and they can’t really function outside of that process. Now it would be good if they had a web page, or some way to outline how their process works so it would be easy to learn how each lender operates. But unfortunately no help really exists from the lenders themselves. That means that agents have to learn the lenders processes elsewhere.
But if realtors are going to play the game, it is their responsibility to learn the rules of the game. However, once an agent understands the rules of the game, most of the frustration of dealing with the lenders will vanish. In addition most short sales will get approved, and they will take a lot less time to get approved.
If we understand how short sales work, and how to work with loss mitigators, we will virtually never have any reason to get upset. Instead when we understand the process, we will easily be able to work within the rules and procedures, and get to closing, and get paid.
Chris Badger of Strategic Loss Mitigation, along with being a real estate Broker, is known as one of the top experts in Short Sales.
For more information see his blog at The Short Sale Blog
For his complete Short Sale guide for agents go to “The Ultimate Short Sale Success System”
[tags]Short sale, Short Sales, Agent Short Sale, Realtor Short Sale, Success, training, system[/tags]
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