Maybe I should have titled this post, “Attention All Lawyers – Bank of America Has Lots of Free Money For You”. What you are about to read might seem like something out of a Franz Kafka novel or a Salvador Dali painting that was somehow brought to life. Only it is verified and real.
It is no secret in the real estate community what Bank of America does (and doesn’t do) regarding short sales. In fact, typing, “short sales bank of america” into Google has this post right on the first page of Google. Bank of America has routinely forced homeowners into foreclosure when a short sale was possible. But when you read the next paragraph and get to the bottom of that paragraph – you will go back to the top and read it again because you will think you’ve misread it. It just can’t say that.
In many instances – where a trustee’s sale has been postponed in order to complete a short sale – once the short sale is successfully completed and title transferred to the new owner – Bank of America then forecloses on the new owner. Investors who have purchased the home at auction will then go the house, change the locks or in some cases break in to the home, thinking that the former owners simply haven’t moved out yet.
The following all happened in my office with my staff:
Apparently BofA has no system in place to cancel trustee sales after a short sale is completed. Our office is currently working on getting trustee sales canceled on 3 files that have closed escrow on a short sale with BofA recently. On one file we closed escrow 26th of January. The trustee sale was scheduled for February 4th and BofA would not discuss canceling the trustee sale until 2 days before it was scheduled. So on February the 1st (and 2nd, and 3rd) we spent over 5 hours trying to get someone at BofA to cancel the trustee sale. In exasperation on the 3rd day of this, we finally told them “go ahead and sell the house that you have no legal right to foreclose on and you can undo it after the fact”. At that point the supervisor urged us to calm down that they wanted to work it out and they couldn’t understand why no one was doing anything.
They told us that Recon Trust (their appointed trustee for sales) charges them $3800 per foreclosure and that they didn’t want to pay that to foreclose on a home that was already sold. We had already spoken to Recon Trust trying to provide copies of the HUD1 that showed the sale had been completed a week ago, but they will only take instruction from BofA (plus there is that $3800 per trustee sale – legit or not). So far we have gotten called off 2 of our 3 homes that are closed but still scheduled for a trustee sale. This has taken hours and hours of our time to get BofA to do a job that is theirs to do. Buyers are reporting notices of sales being posted, investors trying to break in and look at their homes, etc. all because the trustee sale is not halted. The only bank currently doing this to our knowledge is BofA.
Maybe someone from Bank of America reading this could alert someone in a position of authority to actually DO something about it? I know a whole bunch of people who would be very grateful.
