Do you walk the owner through reinstating before you put your number on the table?

Five years of a service business says the referral pays for itself, just not in that deal. The man who reinstated tells three people you were straight with him, and in a rural county three people is the whole market. I'd send him a note in six months asking how it's going.

Separate point, hollow. You gave him a phone number to call and told him to get it in writing. That isn't advising him on his loan, and I'd keep it exactly that narrow.

Arithmetic first. Most of the owners I reach can't reinstate, because the arrears aren't 11k, they're 31k plus fees plus the attorney's costs and the reason they fell behind hasn't changed. Your guy had a relative with cash, which is rare enough that I don't think it should set your policy.

So I say the sentence, because it costs me almost nothing on the ones where it's impossible, and the ones where it's possible were never my deals to begin with.

The counselor referral interests me more than the rest of this. Do owners actually call, or does handing them another phone number just add a step they never take?

beacon, the pattern in everything I've read is that owners in default have already ignored a stack of mail from people who wanted something, so an unsolicited phone number lands in the same pile. The ones who follow through are the ones who were going to call somebody anyway.

hollow, the case against full disclosure that nobody's said yet is time. The auction date doesn't move while your seller spends five weeks in a modification review that gets denied, and then you're buying with 12 days left and no title work. I've watched that happen to somebody in another thread here.

Lived pike's version. Seller went into a review after I'd already paid for title and a survey, review took seven weeks, came back denied, and by then I was inside three weeks to sale with a lien I hadn't cleared. Closed it, barely, and gave back most of the margin buying speed.

I still tell them. But now the sentence includes the timing, that a review can run long and the auction date usually doesn't wait, and I ask them to tell me the day they file anything. That's not advice about their loan, it's me protecting my own calendar.

What's reinstating? I thought once the default notice was filed the bank had already decided.

rigging, in general terms bringing the loan current stops the process, and how late you can do it and what it costs depends on your state and your loan documents, which is why everyone here keeps saying get it from the servicer in writing.

hollow, the reason I do the one sentence version isn't ethics, or it isn't only ethics. It's a filter. The owners who can fix it go fix it and stop taking my calls, and what's left is people who actually need a sale. My close rate on second appointments went up when I stopped chasing anyone who had another way out. Costs me deals on paper, saves me the eight weeks of pretending.