A client of mine called me last week to let me know that he finally got his note modification to go through, and it only took him 1 year and 3 months. 

This fellow came to me last year when he started falling behind on his mortgage payments (he had another agent before me).  He was under water with his home value and was thinking about doing a short sale.  After talking with him for a bit, he told me that he really didn’t want to walk away and wanted to find a way to keep his place.  I suggested that he call his bank and see if they could work out a note modification. 

Prior to this, he’d had trouble getting anyone to speak to him when he called his bank.  By this time, however, he had missed a payment, and the bank was more attentive.  My advice (from dealing with banks on foreclosures and short sales) was to be patiently persistent.  Getting angry, yelling at harried bank employees and hanging up usually gets you no where.  I think that it’s more effective to be understanding and patient in order to persevere through the bank’s bureaucracy.  If you feel like you’re getting no where with the person on the other line, I suggest kindly asking them to “escalate” the file to a supervisor. 

During the year and three months that my client worked on getting his loan modification through, he had is application rejected at least twice and the bank lost track of his file a number of times.  The bank would tell him that they were going to review his file over the next 90 days and get back to him with their proposal.  After 4 months of waiting, my client would call the bank on his own only to find out that they didn’t know what he was talking about.  He had to patiently get the bank back on track and constantly follow up to make sure they stayed on track. 

After getting rejected from the bank’s note modification program, he continued to call and patiently request the reasons that his application was rejected.  Usually, the bank employee didn’t know why, but he kept calling and persisting until they gave him one or more reasons, which he could easily counter.  Once over that hurdle, the bank passed his application on to the next level. 

In the end, his note modification finally went through.  He ended up with a lower interest rate, a longer pay-back term and a payment that he could afford. 

Fannie Mae recently increased penalties for people who simply walk away from their homes.  If you know of someone who is having trouble with their mortgage, I suggest they try to be proactive about it.  Banks seem to be more forgiving when you make an effort to work with them. 

I’m not a mortgage councilor, but I am an expert in distressed (under water) properties.  If you know of someone in trouble, please give them my contact information.  Consultations are free-of-charge and confidential.