Noticed this little add-on buried deep in an e-mail chain from a lender who is two weeks late funding a loan for one of my buyers, even though everything’s been done from the buyers’ end for a month.

I swear if this loan ever funds I never want to hear the name again.

The feeling’s mutual, Ms. Lender. Guaranteed, you’ll never hear from me or one of my clients ever again.

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As we return to some old habits around here, let’s have some music for the weekend.

It’s 67 degrees, the freezer has been defrosted for the first time since I bought it back in 2002, and the mystery lumps in the ice turned out to be ice.

The sun’s shining, the rains of the past two months are in the past and the smell of orange blossoms is in the air.

J.J. Grey, take it away …

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This dovetails nicely into a discussion I was having yesterday with a delightful Canadian couple, the fact that they’re from Alberta thoroughly irrelevant except for feeding the Google keyword monster as we’re oft prone to do.

When making an offer with a short sale there are a handful of possible answers a buyer can receive from the lender:

1. Silence
2. No
3. Yes
4. A qualified yes - yes, we’ll approve the short sale but at our price, not yours

Possibly falling into the latter category is a home on 158th Drive in Pebblecreek, an active adult community in Goodyear, spring training home of the Cleveland Indians and the Cincinnati Reds (full yet, Google monster?)

• List price: $220,000
• Sold price: $245,000

It’s possible the buyers offered $25,000 above the list price on their own. Then again, given the well-below-market list price, it’s also possible the bank said they’d accept the short sale but at their price - still a bit below market - not the buyers.

(Editor’s note: All mystery could be cleared up if I called the listing agent, but that would veer dangerously into the category of research and ultimately could ruin my premise, so I’ll stick with the accepted idea of poetic license.)

Poetic license or not, these situation do happen … a buyer of mine last year was quite pleased to learn the lender had accepted the short sale offer, at least until he learned the bank only would accept a price $12,000 above what he actually offered. When he tried to counter he was told, quite curtly, that counter offers weren’t welcome. The bank’s price was the bank’s price.

Incidentally, that answer took four months to receive … and he was offering cash and a quick close, at least as quick as the bank was able to manage.

Again, none of this is to say you as a buyer shouldn’t consider a short sale if the quirks still allow you to do what you need to do. I also wouldn’t say you shouldn’t consider swimming in a shark tank, should you feel you can defend yourself.

It’s just hard to recommend either course of action.

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In need of reading material for a light rail trip to Tempe last week, I picked up my copy of John Grisham’s “Playing for Pizza” for a second read. This got me missing Italy, which the wife and I visited back in 2006, and I found myself later picking up Tim Parks’ “A Season With Verona” for a second reading as well.

It was in this second book that I ran across this nugget:

“Sometimes he’s so determined to be clever he mesmerises [sic] himself, he can’t remember what he was supposed to be doing, the way sometimes a sentence, an idea, can become so overintricate, so self-regarding in its twists and turns, it collapses in on its own conceit and already the reader is looking elsewhere.”

Tends to remind me of some real estate blogs I’ve read; maybe I’ve made the same error, and perhaps the above transgression is somewhat less odious than the “See Dick tell Jane it’s a great time to buy” drivel that dominates so many websites. But still …

I was reading answers on Trulia Voices the other day, answers but not always questions since the answers as often as not don’t relate to the question and instead become offers to become employed by the questioner by some desperate agent, and it struck me how often there’s virtually useless jargon incorporated into the answer.

BPO, LTV, CMA, TMI …

If you catch me falling into that trap, feel free to call me out on it. Maybe not on the more elaborate constructions, though such sentences really aren’t my style. If the words don’t flow, they don’t flow, and as was once accused of Mozart, I try not to use too many notes, just enough to match the indescribable melody of syntax in my own head.

After all, writing when no one has the slightest idea what you’re saying - whether due to your own need to twist sentence construction into some Mobius-strip like creation, or the use of anagrams that mean nothing to anyone not in the business, or the exuberance with which you blindly try to solicit business even when people want to be informed, not solicited - you’re almost better off not turning on the computer.

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Do you crave power but loathe the idea of accountability? Do you enjoy finding reasons for something not to work rather than taking the time to see why they should? Enjoy wielding arcane and illogical guidelines regardless of how they were intended?

Become an underwriter!

As an underwriter, you have the opportunity to quash the dreams of home buyers and sellers nationwide. And we’re not talking about those dodgy folks using no-doc, zero down loans from yesteryear. No, in 2010 you have the opportunity to screw with people with 800-plus credit scores and large down payments not to mention those FHA buyers for whom there’s always a reason not to lend.

It doesn’t matter whether the guidance provided by the government since a guideline was passed says you’re wrong. You’re the underwriter, which means you’re right! You’re just like Moses coming down from Sinai, except you get to delete, amend and rewrite the tablets on which the Ten Commandments are written however you like. God himself can’t question what you’re doing (though if you have a first born son or aversion to locusts, you may want to show a little restraint, just in case.)

These aren’t the halcyon days when underwriters simply rubber stamped loans no matter how ridiculous the documentation and terms because, hey, everyone was doing it. This is much more fun! Armed with a stack of paper and Google, a good underwriter these days can find almost any reason not to approve a loan.

And why would they approve a loan? It’s not as if lenders are supposed to lend. You see how well that worked for them in the past (though there was less restraint shown than at a Vegas bachelorette party.)

Come on and release the inner curmudgeon within. Once you’ve got the reins, no one can slow you down - not the government, not the loan officers and real estate agents, and certainly not the dupes buyers and sellers counting on you to do your job according to its description, assess risk and make an appropriate decision (one that sometimes, despite it all, should end in an approved loan.)

Want to apply? Call 1-800-FUBUYERS today!

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