Just been served in FL, SS not assigned yet - is there time?

Just got our noticed served - 20 days to respond. House was listed on MLS on 2/17/08- signed contract on 2/22/08. Submitted to Countrywide - still not assigned to anyone (even though they told broker they would “accelerate” it and we would have it assigned by the end of the week. (Is that BS that they feed brokers???)
We have 3 offers in 125K under contract/$126k offer & $126.5k - with only owing $117k on 1st with CW and $30k to 2nd with HSBC I would imagine that the short sale would be the way the banks would want to go?
2nd (HSBC) had different phone # that my broker was calling and they kept telling her not to send anything, that they had to wait for the 1st to decide which offer they would take. After ebing told 2x by HSBC I got my broker to send them the packet with hardship letter, financials, offers, listing contract etc. - for those of you that have been through this, what can we expect timeline wise?
Someone told us not to respond, that it further delays the process?? Doesn’t sound like the right thing to me.
Thank you for any tips/advise :biggrin

Sounds about right to me. Though I would seriously recommend that you get an attorney involved. If it were me, I’d want to avoid the foreclosure and protect myself as much as possible.

It doesn’t sound like your short sale is bank approved (I’m assuming that is what you are talking about). The reason I say that is because the first thing you should have done is send through the hardship letter.

We sent a hardship letter with the listing agreement, yes it is a short sale. More short on time, than short on price.
I had a free phone consult with an attorney that thought the numbers were very “do-able” - said CW was taking .80 on the dollar and with what we owed we were very close to giving them full amount, so they should work with 2nd to get the deal done. He really wasn’t pushing to take my money (of course they like to work with a broker and thier fees come out of that - but we already had a contract and “sale”).
I have read that HSBC will take as little as 1-3k to settle?? What size loan will they settle for so little??
CW is not the “actual lender” that served us - it listed Bank Of New York as plaintiff - can we still work with the hopenow program? Our mortgage checks were made out to CW, so I am confused on that.
Plenty of “we can help you” letters/flyers coming in now (figured something had been filed) - is it best to use an attorney or can we can the help we need from Hopenow? Or one of the various “we can stop foreclosure” people.
What is a reasonable fee to have someone delay/stop the foreclosure, look over the closing (if we get to that point)? Obviously we don’t have alot of money or we wouldn’t be in this - we need to save to rent a house, and they will want more security because of the bankruptcy and poor credit.
We were also told, if we have it listed with a broker for 90 days, then we could do in deed of lieu - does out time still count since we are now listed on the MLS as “pending”?
Sorry alot of questions :rolleyes

BONY is the actual Investor for your loan-- they’re the one that technically owns the mortgage that you owe money to, Countrywide services the loan for Bank of New York-- they collect the payment take out their fee then send rest of money back to the investor. Alot of investors do not have a loan servicing department-- it’s their money/investment but they don’t want to worry about having to take care of the loan on a month to month basis.

A Deed-in-lieu typically is no longer an option if the foreclosure sale date is within the next 45-60 days from what I understand. At this point, on the bank side of things, they’re already paying the foreclosure attorney fees for filing with the courts and publishing the foreclosure.

You probably have lots of companies wanting to help you avoid foreclosure at this point-- if you do end up using any of these companies (whether short sale negotiation co. or loss mitigation services) that they might have to be paid outside of the net proceeds from the sale because in a short sale it seems like most banks are only paying a 5 or 6% realtor commissions and anything additional needs to be split with realtors or paid out of pocket by buyer/seller.

Negotiating the 2nd needs to be done by yourself or your agent-your CW negotiator will tell you what they’ll offer for the 2nd to release.

I could be wrong, but isn’t the Hope program is more for people that would like to remain in a property? (to give time to set up a loan modification or repayment plan…)

Best of luck!