Eureka Funding Partners

At Bank of America, the nation’s largest mortgage servicer, more than 60 percent of approved short sales do not close, which is why the bank wants to streamline the process, said BofA Senior Vice President David Sunlin by telephone Thursday.

Sunlin, who manages short sales for the bank, said the bank’s first goal still is to negotiate a mortgage modification that will let a borrower keep his home. But he said during those negotiations the bank can simultaneously obtain the documentation needed to qualify the borrower for a short sale if the modification doesn’t work.

In the past, Sunlin said, the bank did not begin the lengthy process of qualifying a borrower for a short sale until it had received a purchase offer.

To expedite short sales, Bank of America has enlarged and updated staff training and set up a phone line dedicated to short sales that borrowers and their agents can use.

Also, Sunlin said, in 60 to 90 days the bank will roll out a Web program it will use to find and track the short sales of houses with mortgages that it services. He said the Web portal also will accept qualifying documentation from clients wishing to do short sales.

Sunlin said it typically takes 45 to 60 days for the bank to tell a client if a short sale offer can be accepted, and up to 90 days if an investor must approve it. The goal, he said, is to shorten the wait to a week.

“By doing this, we should see more private sales instead of more sales of bank-owned (houses),” he said. Read Full Article

Bay Area home sales delivered a smidgen of good news in April - but it came laden with the caveat that it’s too soon to declare a turn-around in the beleaguered real estate market.

While home prices plunged compared with the same time last year, the median sales price for existing homes in the nine-county region inched up 4.2 percent in April compared with March, according to MDA DataQuick, a San Diego research firm. It was the first time since October 2007 that the median rose compared with the previous month. Continue

High-end properties are increasingly coming under the sort of pressure once reserved for moderate homes. In fact, as slowing price declines fuel hope that the real estate bottom is near, other signs suggest the worst is on its way for the region’s upscale market. Read More

Well, not quite. Short sales have been underutilized, real-estate agents say, because they’re time consuming. It can take months to get a bank to sign off on a short sale, which is a lot longer than some buyers are willing to wait. Realtors say that banks also try to reduce their commissions on a short sale, which means that the process can involve less pay for more work. “As a Realtor, most of us avoid them like a plague because we all get burned,” says Brett Barry, an agent with Realty Executives in Phoenix. Continue