Dealing with CitiMortgage and their Homeowner Support Specialists!

In this edition we discuss working with CitiMortgage and their support specialists, which are the representatives that handle all of the upfront tasks and prep the files to go to the final negotiator. We’ll also probably sneak in a few additional tips for you, to help you make your short sales go as efficiently as possible!

We first begin with CitiMortgage. And for a lender to have a “setup rep” or “support specialist” to handle the more mundane tasks involved in a short sale is likely nothing new for most of us. But we’d like to take this opportunity to talk about the specialists at Citi and some of the nuances of dealing with them.

First off, know that these support specialists will be assigned within just a few days of you sending in the short sale package, so you should get up and running quickly. And as we said above, they are the reps responsible for prepping the file to go to the final negotiator. To accomplish that, these reps will go through all the documents for the short sale package to make sure they’re all present and filled out properly. They are also the ones responsible for ordering the BPO or appraisal and adding it to the file once it comes back in. They also are responsible for ordering a credit report to include with everything else, so that the negotiator can check for pertinent information that might affect the short sale process, things such as additional mortgages, whether or not the seller has additional lines of credit, and if the seller is current or in default on other debts. And so when these tasks are complete, the support specialist will send the file to the negotiator.

While all of this is going on, the support specialist will be the single point of contact for the file, and the person who will have all the answers for you, so you may not want to waste much time speaking to general reps in the short sale department, because they won’t know what’s going on, and will likely only frustrate you. About the only thing a general rep will be able to do for you is schedule an appointment to speak with the support specialist to discuss the file. And that is the third point we’d like to share with you. As part of their normal process, you will need to schedule a time to speak to the support pecialist in order to discuss the status of the file and what may still be needed in order to get the file to the negotiator. So be aware of that, and make sure you abide by that, because I can promise you…if you don’t have an appointment, the support specialist will NOT call you back!

Outside of our dealings with Citi, we’ve had many more battles with banks and sellers alike. Some have yielded results, others have not. As you go about your daily business, you’ll face many of these types of situations. As short sale specialists we’re not only negotiating with lenders, we’re “negotiating” with buyers, sellers, agents, attorneys, mortgage brokers, etc. And the objective for all of us is to be able to convince all these parties to do what we need them to do in order to get the short sale done. The tips we’d like to provide for you are a couple key things: keep your instructions and equests brief and simple and to-the-point, and secondly, try to find a common ground with everyone you speak to, so you can relate to them, and so they’ll see that you’re just like them. If you can learn to successfully achieve these two things…then we promise you’ll see some huge results and find much more success! It’s a constant battle for us, and something we are always working on.