I’d like to take this opportunity to vent on one of my latest RE transactions. Last year my wife and I put a offer on a short sale (we ended up buying the place). We put in an offer of 925K for the house and there were three loans on the property, the first with B of A and two others with a second bank. I should have known that there would be problems as the home had fallen out of escrow three times IIRC.
After three months, the sellers realtor gets back to us and says that B of A is countering at 934K for the home. When we sit down to go over the transaction, I notice that B of A is getting 898K there is 27K going to the bank holding the second and third and 9K as a “refund to the seller”. When I ask what this refund was, she said not to worry about it and it was always in the contracts. I said no it is not, to which she replied that she is the agent and knows better than I what is in real estate contracts. She goes on to “explain” that since this is not the official accounting (what ever that form is called) they just lump all the expected costs into one line item and that these costs are going to be paid by B of A.
(all this time our agent is doing everything she can to control her anger)
Knowing that something was amiss, I asked to see all the correspondence between her and the banks. At first she said that it was impossible because all the electronic communication (e-mail and the banks short sale system) is deleted as soon it is closed after she reads it. I tell her BS, and the next day I get a whole bunch of electronic communications between her and the banks. It took me about 15 minutes to find out that at the time she submitted our offer to B of A, she told the holder of the other two notes that they will get 36K (the amount they settled for in the last attempt but still about 6% of what they are owed). When B of A finally got back to her, they had accepted our offer and were going to pay the other bank 27K.
AFTER hearing from B of A (based on the e-mail time stamps) she sent an e-mail to the other bank with “Great news”, B of A as agreed to give them the 36K for the loans, knowing full well this was not true. Her plan was to try to hide the extra 9K as some sort of fees or something that we would have to pay for.
We called her on this, and said that she has lied to us, our realtor and the banks involved with this transaction. She got very indignant and stated that she has never done anything unethical in her life, and that we were not smart enough to understand how real estate transactions work. She went on and on about how complicated these things are and how you can’t just “add up the numbers” in the transactions so we had just better do what she says since she knows best.
Well, we wanted the house and our agent suggested that we just split the 9K three ways. So that is what we did and I just kept quiet as possible for the rest of the transaction.
The Worst part is that she now lives three houses away from us!
I know that there are good, honest realtors out there (ours has always done a great job for us) but it is incompetent and dishonest prople like this that give the whole profession it’s bad reputation.
