[quote SD Realtor]
The lender or loan servicing company can discuss the loan ONLY WITH THE HOMEOWNER OR WHOEVER THE HOMEOWNER GIVES THIRD PARTY AUTHORIZATION LETTER TO THAT LOAN SERVICER. Thus it is ILLEGAL for the lender or loan servicer to discuss anything with anyone else. Plain and simple.
[/quote]
Once the property goes into foreclosure, the situation changes. The problem is in the negotiated short sales. The lenders should also be requiring that the ‘homesitter’ gives the loan servicer/lender the right to discuss house prices, conditions and availability with interested parties (possibly with some restrictions). If the ‘homesitter’ wishing to do the short sale doesn’t want to give the lender this ability, immediately kick it over to foreclosure.
I suspect the real problem is that lenders/loan servicers were not really prepared for a loan delinquency rate of the current scale. On foreclosures, the lenders are unprepared to watch their listing agents to make sure that there are no ‘behind the back’ deals. They ‘just want to move the properties’. In addition to the banks being a bit ‘out to lunch’ on how to handle the size of the current delinquencies, I suspect that a moderate amount of ‘bad elements’ managed to make their way into the RE Broker/Agent pool during the Real Estate ‘heydays’..
Requiring a listing to ‘season’ before closure is a good idea, but immediately listing it as ‘pending’ during the ‘seasoning’ period is possibly a way they dance around it.
[quote CA renter]
That is exactly the problem if they ever want to eliminate or reduce the fraud. If the “homeowners” have no equity, the lenders (and their agents) should be the only parties controlling the sale/disposition of the property.
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Cant use the having ‘no equity’ as a reason. Who values it as having no equity? If the ‘homeowner’ is current on the loan, the loan is in arrears and revealing home sale info potentially reveals a persons credit state. The real qualification should be that if the ‘homeowner’ wants to do a short sale, the bank has to be ‘at the table’. This is because the ‘homeowner’ is asking the bank to take a loss on a secured loan. The real problem is that the lenders are not handling it well. They have the ability to force the short sale to go the way they want. The lenders can require the ability to discuss the property with potential bidders outside of the ‘sort sellers broker’, otherwise all short sale offers brought to them will be refused (Just make it a matter of the lenders policy on short sales).
