Industry Alert About ING Direct and Their Short Sale Processing

We currently have 4 short sale listings in escrow. Actually, that might be an exaggeration. We have offers on 4 short sales listings, but the banks have yet to approve them. In some cases, we have escrow paperwork started with title companies, but in other cases we don’t. I tend to call this period escrow, but since we don’t really have a fully executed contract without bank approval, what we really have is offers. There’s no status in MLS for “offers exist” on a short sale, so in most cases they still show as active. One home has a full price offer, so we agreed to move that one to pending.

At any rate, the point of this post wasn’t to talk about statuses in MLS, and how they don’t quite marry up with the short sale process, it was to talk about one bank in particular: ING Direct. ING Direct is primarily an online bank. I have a colleague that used to do mortgage work for many of my clients until he moved to Florida. When he moved he shopped his own refinance around and chose to do the loan via ING Direct, because he couldn’t broker a better deal himself. The loan took forever, had numerous hassles, but in the end, he saved some money.

That was a typical story I had heard about online mortgage companies. Lower prices achieved through lower quality service. It wasn’t something you could trust your earnest money to, so using them to make a purchase in the resale market was risky at best. Instead using banks like ING Direct made the most sense in a refinance scenario, when you had flexibility with your time.

Getting back to the short sale situation, one of the homes we have offers on has the first mortgage through ING Direct. I’m not looking at my notes, so I don’t recall exactly when we received the offer, but it feels like roughly 30 days ago, give or take. The offer is for all cash and the buyers can close in a week once the bank approves. The price was a bit low, but the buyers were billionaires, and they like to negotiate. We immediately submitted everything to ING Direct. Yesterday, we had still heard absolutely nothing from them. Tanya Boruch and I are partnered on this deal, and she has called and left messages at least 20 times attempting to get some sort of status. ING Direct refused to give her a direct number to their work out department, and every time she requested to be transferred into the department (after waiting on hold with customer service for around an hour) was always connected to a phone that just rang and rang and rang, with no answer, no on hold queue, and no messaging system.

The buyers are in Europe right now, and communicating through their agent, are frustrated that they don’t already own this house. They want to remodel it, and have an ever shrinking window of time for which the property will continue to make sense for them. The deal is being held together by the thinnest of threads, and we know it. Their buyer’s agent calls me at least weekly asking for a status, and my answer is always, we are trying our best, but so far have nothing.

So yesterday I suggested to Tanya to send email to every contact you can find on ING Direct’s website. She was able to send an email to the CEO, along with a number of other big wigs at ING Direct. Today, we got a call back. The big wig (CEO or President, I don’t recall which) at ING Direct promised that someone from the work out department will have reviewed the case and will call us tomorrow (Wednesday).

I don’t know why I didn’t think of using email sooner. It’s an online company, so that makes perfect sense, now that I think about it. Heck, someone there probably has a twitter account, and we could even be friends (I have just 285 friends on Twitter, but I’d love to be your friend if you would start following SteveBelt).

The big wig (I apologize to ING Direct for not know whom at the company I am specifically referring to, but it’s probably best to keep that name off my blog) gave Tanya his personal cell phone, so I do expect our case will begin moving along at a respectable pace. With any luck, we’ll have an appraisal ordered in a day or two, with a fair resolution by the end of next week. That’s all we’ve ever wanted. We aren’t asking for split second decision making. Slow and steady can win this race, so long as there is steady progress.

I’ll follow-up in either comments or with a new post, depending on how exciting this gets in the days ahead, so stay tuned. FYI, if you leave a comment, you can subscribe to comments so that you won’t miss any of the discussion here on the Phoenix Area Real Estate Blog.

photo credit: ckaroli

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