Lesson Three: Nationstar Sucks

I promised to tell you the story of our ridiculously prolonged short sale. Well, gather ‘round my dears. Boy, have I got a story for you.

Back in May, when we first offered on our dream home, we thought that ours would be a normal short sale – by which I mean, frustrating and prolonged, but still predictable. We surely thought we’d be in our new house by now. Instead, 7 months later, we’re not even close.

The homeowners, anxious to get rid of their extra mortgages, leapt at our offer. The next step for any short sale is for the lien holder – or in our case, two lien holders because the homeowners had taken out a second mortgage – to approve the sale price.

The “first” lien holder (basically the primary mortgage lender) was a bank called Aurora. Facing financial troubles, Aurora was more than happy to accept our offer. Then we had to wait for the second lien holder, SLS, to approve the price.

While we waited – VERY patiently – for SLS to approve the price, Aurora got bought out by a third bank, Nationstar. Because SLS is apparently run by a bunch of stupid-heads (that’s right, I said it), they decided that this was a good reason to start the approval process all over again. *Facepalm.*

At first, Nationstar seemed reasonable. They agreed to honor Aurora’s original approval and allow the sale to continue. We breathed a sigh of relief.

But then, Nationstar decided that SLS was taking too long. Aurora’s approval was set to expire at the end of July, and SLS wasn’t coming any closer to approval. Nationstar came back and told us that they would not extend the approval, which meant that if SLS didn’t approve our price by the end of July, Nationstar would start its own approval process from the beginning.

Needless to say, SLS didn’t approve by the end of July. Nationstar went back to the drawing board. Because Nationstar went back to the drawing board, SLS figured it would be really fun for them to start over (AGAIN) as well.

So as of August 1, two and a half months after we placed our offer, we were back to square one.
By this time, I was a mere two months away from the wedding I had been carefully planning for over a year (for anyone who likes wedding stuff, check out this tangential post on our wedding). Wedding planning consumed my every waking thought, so thoughts of the house and the banks took a backseat for a while.

Then, in September, something finally happened: Nationstar came back and said, “We won’t pay closing costs unless you get prequalified through us and use us as your mortgage provider.” We already had a mortgage lender that we were very happy with, but we figured it was worth the sacrifice to get a home that we really loved and we simply couldn’t afford to pay closing costs in addition to paying for a wedding, a down payment, and escrow.

When we called to get prequalified through Nationstar, the representative told us that he had spoken to the underwriters (those mysterious people who approve just about everything relating to purchasing a home), and that he thought we should hear something about the approval within a week or two.

Much rejoicing ensued.

Three days later, the same guy from Nationstar called Dear Hubby and left him a voicemail stating that our house had gone into foreclosure, but he stopped it in time so everything would be okay. This, of course, would mean a further delay in approval, which he was sure we could understand, and so we would hear something within 30 to 45 days.

Shocked, we immediately called our realtor, who called the seller’s realtor, who said that there was ABSOLUTELY NO POSSIBLE WAY that the home could have gone into foreclosure. Apparently, the homeowners had been paying BOTH mortgages since the day they moved out, which at that point had been 9 months earlier. What’s more, he checked the county listings and no paperwork had ever been filed to foreclose on the house.

We were left with the very uncomfortable notion that we were dealing with a bank that was not only slow and incompetent (and run by retarded, feces-throwing monkeys), but one that also lied to us.

We returned to the waiting game. In the meantime, we got married (yay!). When we returned from our honeymoon, we contacted our realtor. We had finally decided to heed her advice and go back to house hunting. At this point, 5 months after we placed our offer on the house, home prices had gone up substantially. We found that we would not be able to afford a house that was as big and as pretty as the one we had offered on months earlier. Thoroughly depressed, we waded back into the market anyway.

The universe being what it is, Nationstar finally came back with an update the same day that we placed an offer on a different house. They decided that they wanted us to up our offer by $2,000. Knowing that the area’s prices had increased by a much larger margin, we agreed to the new sale price. At this point, we, our agent, and the seller’s agent all agreed that we were mere days away from having an agreement. We went ahead with a home inspection (which went swimmingly – more on that in another post). We waited.

Nothing happened.

Since then, we’ve been looking for other houses. We’ve seen houses without toilets, houses with bad roofs, houses with cramped floor plans, houses with holes in the walls, houses with rooms that have no windows, houses with broken windows, and houses with wood paneling on every wall.

And so we wait for Nationstar.

Because Nationstar has proven to be so pathetically incompetent, we’ve had second thoughts about using them as our mortgage lender.