Chase Home Finance: Anatomy of an Actual Short Sale

Unfortunately, all the banks are bad. It is just a matter of how bad. I just got a Middle Tennessee short sale approval from Bank of America (2 loans with the 1st owned by Fannie Mae and the 2nd by BOA) in 3-4 weeks from start to finish for a property in Murfreesboro TN. However, I have been working on La Vergne TN short sale with Chase (2 loans with the 1st owned by Freddie Mac and the 2nd by Bank of Nashville). The loss mitigation person from Chase did not return 5 voicemails after the BPO was done. Finally, I contacted Freddie Mac to force a response from Chase. The lady from Chase got back to me (wow she was NOT HAPPY) to tell me she needed updated documents and missing documents (almost all were sent months ago) and that she sent a letter to seller requesting those documents. Since she did not hear back she was going to close the file. Of course, I asked her why she did not just call me given that I LEFT 5 VOICEMAILS. She said she had no authorization to speak with me. Of course I sent the authorization months ago and only by using it was I able to get the file to this point so her claim that she did not have it was absurd. I promptly emailed it to her. After she received it she said the the bank wanted $102,000 as the short sale price. When I told her the was absurdly high and that the sale comps that I looked at when I listed it where not even close to that figure she said “I guess the market went up since then.” Of course when I checked the sale comps the only ones remotely close to $100K were in a different section of the townhouse neighborhood with stone fronts and most were end units (the unit I am trying to sell is in a low end section of the neighborhood with all siding (i.e. no stone fronts) and is not an end unit). The only actual closed sale in the same section of the neighborhood is a Fannie Mae foreclosure 10 homes down the block. It sold in March 2009 for $57,500. The loss mitigation lady from Chase told me that I cannot use short sale or foreclosure sale comps. Therefore, I searched the entire neighborhood (The Cottages of Lake Forest) for all sales in 2009. There were a total of 8 closed sales. 7 of them were short sales and foreclosures (i.e. 87.5% of the market)! How can I eliminate these sale comparables? They are practically the entire market. As a result of this I have to prepare a market analysis to dispute the valuation. According to Chase, this will delay the response by 3-4 weeks more, but at this point I have no other option so I will be submitting that today. We will see…..