B Of A Announces Shorter Short Sales!

BofA Reduces Short Sale Approvals To 2 Weeks

I'll believe it when I see it. Bank of America has been notorious in the past for long, drawn out short sales, but in an 'exclusive' webinar this week with BofA top brass the announcement of new policies and procedures to expedite short sale approvals was announced.

"We have some GREAT news for those of you that have your mortgage with Bank of America. I just attended an “exclusive” LIVE webinar with Kimberly Dawson, a Vice President at BofA that oversees their short sale operations. BofA holds almost 25% of the mortgage market and processed almost 100,000 short sales in 2010. They are estimating exceeding that in 2011…….They will close approximately 10,000 short sales per month.

How Bank of American is changing their short sales process

BofA is “pre-approving” short sales before they are even listed on the MLS. This is much different from the “normal” short sale where we list the home, get a contract, gather all the paperwork, submit to the lender, and then WAIT. BofA is calling this a 'Cooperative Short Sale.'"

In addition to the 'pre-approving' of short sales, Bank of America will also be utilizing a new internet software that will assist with document management and ultimately streamlining the entire process for the bank and short sale processors.

Bank of America's program to help automate the short sale process

"BofA has also implemented a new web-based short sale tool called Equator (www.Equator.com). It is a transaction mgmt system that has GREATLY increased the speed and efficiency of the short sale process. We are very experienced in using the tool and we love it! It has made my life much easier. We used to fax documents to BofA and they would get lost….multiple times! It was a nightmare. No more."

Ayers, Rich. "BofA is reducing short sale approval to approx 2 weeks!" The Ayers Team. January 21, 2011 (accessed January 22, 2011).

Our personal experience with Equator is much less impressive then the article states. Our office handles a lot of short sale transactions and we have seen short sale paper work lost and sometimes Equator feels like a short sale purgatory. It would be great to see Bank of America get their short sale process time frame down considerably. The article also states that the typical BofA short sale time line from open to close is between 1 and 4 months. From our short sale experience, this could not be farther from the truth. Rarely do we see BofA approve a short sale in under 4 months, though we have had some quick BofA short sale closes, most of BofA's short sales take much longer then 4 months to complete.

Overall, it is good that BofA is changing their short sale process, this part is long over due. Our major question with this new policy change is this...did BofA improve their short sale process because of internal mandates or pending legislation from investors and property owners?

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