As many of you know, I rarely.....RARELY, work with buyers...I have a team for that, at least I have referral agents for that however, I got a recent buyer referral and of course, I work those. So, I take the buyer out, we look at some homes and he finally decides to put down an offer. The offer is on a REO...so, I am thinking to myself, "I can do this in my sleep"...because I list REO's myself. Well, come to find out, I was completely mistaken.
So, we get our offer over to the seller's agent, let's call him Lionel the Listing Agent. A couple days later, I get a call from a member of his team, who works all the offers. She tells me the seller is countering and she sends me an email with the seller's terms. After some careful reading my buyer and I are a little concerned because the closing cost language isn't exactly the way we put it in on our offer. You see, I usually use the following closing cost language.....
"Seller to pay up to, $6,000.00 towards buyers; items payable in connection with the loan, items required by lender to be paid in advance, reserves deposited with lender, title charges, government recording and transfer charges, any additional settlement charges"
The seller replied back with, "Seller has countered the following items from your offer: Seller will pay $6,000.00 towards buyers closing cost and prepaids. Seller will pay title if Buyer uses Sellers attorney which is Super Title (Name changed to protect the innocent), Seller will contribute up to $500.00 towards a home warranty of Buyer's choice/plan. Buyer's agent will be responsible for ordering the home warranty"
Now, here is the problem, after speaking with the buyer and the buyer speaking with his lender, he isn't going to use all the $6,000.00 and suggested we add "upfront mortgage insurance", which many of you will know is covered under "items required by lender to be paid in advance"...hence why I use the closing language I do.
I countered the seller counter and said, we would like to add in "upfront mortgage insurance" in our special stipulations language and oh dear sweet baby Jesus.....it was like we asked for the 2nd coming of Christ. The listing agents just couldn't understand it, went back to the seller, the seller couldn't understand it and everyone seemed like we were asking for green eggs and ham. We went round and round for like 2 days explaining over and over again, we want to add the "upfront mortgage insurance" because if your seller agrees to give us $6,000.00 we want to use the full $6,000.00. So, finally the listing agent team member doesn't know why the AM is having a problem with that and instead of getting us an answer, she resorts to telling us that either we agree to the amended terms, which changed to...,
"All BCC (Buyers Closing Cost) to appear on the HUD and be approved by lender and title company"
As you can imagine, this was completely unacceptable to the buyer because now, after speaking with the lender, the seller just cut our closing cost credit in half because the lender's closing cost only accounted for about half of the money the seller agreed to provide. In other words, by using the latest wording, we could only use the funds for closing cost....and nothing else. We couldn't use it for pre-paids, incidentals or anything else.
Well....here we go, around and around again and finally, the listing agent team member begins threatening that if we don't sign the deal as written, they are going to just reject the deal. The problem here is, all we are asking to do is to spend the money.....the dollars that the seller has agreed to as we see fit....................WHAT IS THE DAMN PROBLEM, THE NET TO THE SELLER ISN'T CHANGING?
So, after a day or so of crazy talk, listing agents who just don't seem to get it, my buyer says, let's just agree to their original terms .........
"Seller has countered the following items from your offer: Seller will pay $6,000.00 towards buyers closing cost and prepaids. Seller will pay title if Buyer uses Sellers attorney which is Super Title (Name changed to protect the innocent), Seller will contribute up to $500.00 towards a home warranty of Buyer's choice/plan. Buyer's agent will be responsible for ordering the home warranty"
.......and just be done with it.
I send it over to the listing agent and inform them via email....my buyer agrees to your original counter. So, two days later, they send me over the REO addendum and it reads .....
"FM to pay up to $500.00 towards HOW to be selected by buyer. FM to pay $6000 towards bcc."
Ok...so, if you didn't catch the problem......I can't help you. None the less, this isn't going to work, for the same reasons I already stated above.
So, we go back to the listing agent team member, explain that we agreed to their terms and therefore, we would like to see those terms in the addendum. She tells me that we should write those terms in the state offer but, not to change the reo addendum. As we all know, if it's not in the reo addendum, it's not enforceable. So, I bring this up to her and we are threatened again....either we sign it the way it is, or they will reject the deal. DAMN, do you not understand, we are agreeing to your sellers terms....we are just asking that you put those terms in your sellers addenum.....lol.
After going around and around about that, finally my buyer says, let's stop talking to this listing agent team member and talk with the listing agent. He calls the listing agent, gets insulted by the listing agent before the agent realizes he is actually talking directly to my buyer.....and per my buyer, after about 10 attempts at explaining to him that we agree to your sellers terms, now put your sellers terms in your sellers addendum....the light switch catches and he goes....oh...yeah, we need to do that.
My problems are....
1. The listing agent obviously isn't involved in his own transaction.
2. No one is supervising the agent working the deal to ensure the seller's terms are actually put in the sellers addendum.
3. Rather than listening, talking and working together, the listing agents are hyper defensive and rather than negotiating, they would rather threaten the deal and strong arm the buyer into a signature when they themselves don't even know what is wrong with their own sellers addendum.
