Southwest Florida Title Insurance & Real Estate Blog

If you’ve ever worked on short sale transactions in the real estate industry, then you probably know how frustrating it can be when lenders put a value on either an appraisal or even a “drive by BPO” (broker price opinion) without sharing the report with the sellers and or potential buyer.

For me, it’s absolutely infuriating when a lender counters a property’s appraised value but then never tells us what value they arrived at.

Fortunately, things are changing at Bank of America.

Recent changes to Bank of America’s short sale process include providing a valuation report to the customer each time a value is obtained and used as part of the process.

This change improves the customer experience by providing more transparency and clarity to the information used in reaching a decision on a short sale offer. Valuation reports will be supplied each time a value is obtained.

Whether you have initiated the short sale with an offer or are just beginning the short sale process and do not yet have an offer, your customer should understand that:

• A current value for the property must be determined, which then helps determine the market value
• This process typically takes less than two weeks to complete

Note:

• For Equator® short sale files: The valuation report will be available in the Equator record
• Non-Equator short sale files: The valuation report will be mailed to the customer

What can you do to assist with the valuation process?

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It is very common that a servicing transfer may occur at any time during the short sale process, especially with many Bank of America loans. Bank of America services mortgage loans for hundreds of investors.

As a part of normal servicing, investors may decide to release or transfer servicing from Bank of America to another company. The transfer of loan servicing is a common practice across the industry, and occurs for a variety of reasons.

At certain times investors choose to partner with other servicing companies to help meet the needs of the investor. Servicing may be transferred on first, second or stand-alone liens. You should contact the new servicer to determine what steps need to be taken to continue with the short sale.

Some key activities that may occur during servicing transfer:

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Lately, we have been advised by many lenders’ that you can’t use electronic signatures on short sales.  The major lending institutions really do not like to see electronic signatures.

Despite an announcement in late May of 2012 that Freddie Mac will allow it, the servicers usually frown upon it.

On February 22, 2013 Bank of America recently advised us that they will now accept electronic signatures on most documents collected throughout the processing of short sales; however there are specific requirements that must be met in order for the documents to be accepted.

Real Estate agents choosing to use electronic signatures will need to check with their electronic service provider to ensure the below requirements can be met prior to initiating a short sale.

DocuSign, is one of the providers that has shown they have the capability to meet Bank of America’s security requirements.

The requirements are as follows:
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