Fannie May Procedures - Verbal Counters?????
I'm trying to purchase a bank owned property, owned by Fannie Mae.
I submitted my offer by my agent and the selling agent contacted my agent and said they countered my offer. My offer was 121k, listing was 164.9k they verbally countered at 164k.
I asked my agent to get the counter back in writing from the selling agent, the selling agent said that we don't work with written counters, that Fannie Mae only works in verbal counters???
WTF?
That makes no sense to me! Is this a line of BS? This thing stinks to me of an agent tired of seeing low ball offers, or trying to steer deals to someone else.
What do you think of the verbal counter and what should I do?
You know what. We are closing on a fanneie mae foreclosure tomorrow. We went through the same exact thing. We presented our offer in writing (normal protocol) to fannie mae's agent by our agent. Guess what happened. They countered verbally. On the top of it, the listing agent lied there were multiple offers a few days after submitting initial offer, so we were forced to give them our best offer. Our best offer was $2000 above our initial offer. Later we figured that it was a BS. Then again, they verbally told us that our final best offer was accepted. They told us that we had to close it within 30 days of the verbal acceptance and we had no idea that the acutal date of verbal acceptance was.
Fannie Mae did not even give us legible copy of contrant (it was faxed a few times and shrunk up so bad), so we really did not know what the contract said until like two weeks ago. We asked for it so many times, but they did not give it to us. We finanally called the attorney's office who handles fannie mae foreclosures, and thye fedexed it to us.
I really think that they wanted us to miss seven day period after the acceptance of our offer to have inspection. Which we missed. So we couldn't even back out of contract without losing our earnest money. They are really dirty. We made a huge mistake of using a real estate agent who we never used before and he only has two years of experience. You really need to be careful and use a real estate agent who is very experienced dealing with fannie mae. We dealed with Bank One before, but they were not as bad as fannie mae.
To continue the stangeness of this, my agent recontacted the selling agent again and the selling agent for Fannie Mae said that if your buyer is trying to do a fix and flip tell him he is wasting his time, that Fannie Mae has been doing this for 30 years and they will just fix it up themselves and sell it.
HUH???
Fannie Mae is in the rehab business, and always has been?? I would love to hear from some investors here who have first hand knowledge of these claims and can shed some light on all this. If I take this agents word for it, then it seems that any properties I come across that are owned by Fannie Mae I should just not even bother with since they will never accept a low offer and will just fix them up themselves and retail them. I never knew Fannie Mae was known for this.
[addsig]
That is total BS. The house we we are buying a fixture upper, and they absolutely refused to do anything for the house or to give us money to fix it. But a very strange thing happened. After they accepted our offer, they painted whole ceiling and interior wall, and they never told us about it. They are so weired.
Next time, I encounter a fannie mae foreclosure, unless I absolutely love the property for some reason, I will not even want to mess with them. It is just too much trouble.
I've never had a written counteroffer. Strange huh...