Real Estate Definitions

One of the main purposes of the HAFA (Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives) Program was to facilitate and streamline the Short Sale process.  Bank of America, for some reason, outsources all of it’s HAFA short sale files to 3rd party servicing companies… who in turn take 90 to 150 days (sometimes longer) to review and approve a HAFA Short Sale.  A short sale submitted through a “traditional” short sale route with BofA only take 60 days to process through their Equator system (An Online interface used for communication between Realtors and BofA).  This has been going on for over a year now and the HAFA short sale route is still taking significantly longer than the traditional route.  It’s dissapointing that AMS and other servicers that BofA uses to process it’s HAFA short sales is not getting any better… and it’s more dissapointing that BofA has not done ANYTHING about it yet.  It puts Realtors in a position where they might recomend a borrower not pursue a HAFA short sale with BofA, thus taking away the chance for homeowners to get $3,000 at the completion of a short sale… which in reality is the only benefit for a borrower to go through a HAFA short sale.  We are hoping things get better for BofA HAFA going into 2012… I’ll keep you all up to speed with later posts.