The seller kept calling the reinstatement figure "the number I need to save my house" and it was a different number every time

Something I cannot stop thinking about: in a pre-foreclosure deal, the reinstatement amount and the full payoff are two separate figures, and sellers almost never distinguish between them because they are trying to solve a different problem than you are. The reinstatement amount is what it costs to bring the loan current, past-due payments plus fees, and stop the foreclosure clock. The payoff is what it costs to retire the loan entirely and clear title. On a loan that has been in default for eight months, those two numbers can sit 40 to 60 thousand dollars apart on a 200k balance, sometimes more if the servicer has been advancing fees. A seller who tells you "I need 32k to save it" may be right about reinstatement and completely wrong about what your purchase has to cover. Your purchase has to cover the payoff, not the reinstatement. If you underwrite to what the seller thinks they need and then the payoff demand comes in, the spread between those two figures eats directly into whatever you were going to pay the seller above their loan balance. I have watched a deal that penciled at 18k to the seller collapse to 4k once the real payoff landed, and the seller felt deceived even though nobody lied to them. The fix is to get the payoff demand in writing from the servicer before the seller signs anything, and to explain clearly in the first conversation that reinstatement and payoff are not the same question. If you use the seller's reinstatement figure as a proxy for your purchase underwriting, the assumption doing the most work in your model is one the servicer did not give you. When you sit down with a pre-foreclosure seller, which figure do they usually give you first, and have you found a way to get the servicer on the phone before the agreement is signed?