How far should a buyer go in walking a distressed owner through reinstatement

Anyone who has run a service business for long will tell you 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. Send him a note in six months asking how it is going. Separate point, hollow. You gave him a phone number to call and told him to get it in writing. That is not advising him on his loan, and keeping it exactly that narrow is the right call.

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.

The risk pike describes is real, and it is worth laying out how it goes. Say the seller enters a loss mitigation review after the buyer has already paid for title and a survey. The review runs seven weeks and comes back denied, and by then the buyer is inside three weeks to the sale date with a lien still uncleared. The deal can still close, barely, and most of the margin goes to buying speed. The answer is still to tell them. The sentence just needs to include the timing, that a review can run long and the auction date usually does not wait, along with a request that the seller say the day they file anything. That is the buyer protecting their own calendar rather than advising on the loan.

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.