Vanderbilt Mortgage: Attitude and Guessing Games

I am working on getting a short sale approval for a house in Destin FL.  The mortgage is about $200,000 and the offer is for $130,000 (modified for the sake of confidentiality), which is slightly under maximum market value of $145,000.  The lender is Vanderbilt Mortgage.  To be blunt, they are not nice.  Most lenders have been in this game long enough to know how the system works, and have probably had thousands of short sale requests.  Vanderbilt just doesn’t want to play.  Here is what is going on:

Faxed Vanderbilt 41-page short sale package with typical items, contract, settlement statement, hardship letter, etc.

After several days and numerous phone calls to Vanderbilt, they state the party handling the file is on “vacation” and to fax all to a different number.

After several more days and numerous phone calls to Vanderbilt I am told they cannot find the fax.  OK, I am used to this sort of thing, so ask where they want me to fax it the third time.  The girl says, “You don’t need to fax it again, just tell me the net.”  I was a bit dumbfounded, and pressed that I didn’t want to waste the effort I had made in preparing the package.  She insisted and I told her.  She said she would give the “credit manager” the net figure and told me to call back on Wednesday.  I called back on Wednesday as instructed, and was told the offer was “rejected”. Oh, that’s nice.  “What’s the counter?” I asked.  I was already getting a sick feeling about this bank, call it “short sale intuition”.  The gentleman told me there was no counteroffer, but if I called back Thursday he would tell whoever was in charge to give me a counter.

I called back on Thursday.  That’s today.  I was told the person I spoke with yesterday “did not know what he is talking about.  We do not counter offer.”  I asked “Is this a guessing game?”  She wasn’t very pleasant, and said mortgage balance was $200,000.  I told her that wasn’t market value.  (By the way, most lenders understand that.)  She actually said, “Well, it may or may not be market value.”  And she proceeded to arrogantly spew forth about how they normally don’t entertain short sales and they don’t do things like other companies do.

Fascinated by this statement, I decided to do a Google search on Vanderbilt Mortgage.  Wow.   On their site they claim to be the largest lender for manufactured homes.  But several of the Google results are findings like “ripoff report”, “scam fraud alert”  “complaints”, etc. Apparently a lot of people don’t like Vanderbilt.  Me either.