The Successful Landlord Blog

Recently I had the distinct displeasure to deal with Lender Business Process Services Inc.(LBPS), a subsidiary of IBM.

One of the mortgages on a rental property we own is serviced by these jokers and it seems that I’m not the only one who feels like this. I’ve asked around about other people’s experience with this company and the sentiments all seem to be the same. LBPS is making a (bad) name for themselves by being incompetent, difficult to work with and annoying in general.

I’ll start with their insurance department: I have heard from no less than 3 property insurance agents who have expressed such frustration in dealing with LBPS that the mere mention of the name elicits groans all around. Apparently, if the insurance agent needs documents or escrow information from LBPS it takes an inordinate amount of time for them to produce these documents. When asked if the documents can be emailed to speed things up, the response from LBPS is that “they don’t do email.” Any documents will have to be sent via US Mail. Now remember, LBPS is a subsidiary of International Business Machines (IBM), one of the largest and oldest computer companies in the world….and their subsidiary “doesn’t do email?” Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest post by the Calgary mortgage specialists at the Purcell Mortgage Team.  For mortgage related tips and tricks, check out their weekly-updated mortgage blog.

The real estate market has had its ups and downs, with the end result being plummeting rents and massive foreclosure rates.  For the savvy investor, this also means sweet deals on respectable properties.  This, of course, leads us to the question of the hour: should you pay off the mortgage(s) on your rental properties, or do you leverage the equity you’ve built in them to purchase new ones?

Understandably, it’s a tough call.

Read the rest of this entry »

So, recently a Realtor I know told me of a deal that fell through 2-days shy of closing due to an idiotic lending policy, or at least that was the bank’s excuse.

Apparently a buyer was in contract to purchase a piece of real estate as part of a short-sale. Granted, short-sales are not normal real estate transactions in that there are usually extra variables thrown into the deal which, more often than not, complicate things  sometimes to the point of insanity.

So while the buyer is in contract to purchase a short-sale property, the geniuses at Bank of America all but approve the financing, perform an appraisal, urge the buyer to have the property inspected and surveyed, and then, two days before closing, they kill the deal in underwriting because, and get this, the buyer’s daughter, for whom the buyer receives child-support, is enrolled in a two-year college and not a four-year college. This means that Bank of America allowed child support, for a “child” who is over 18 years-old, to be counted as income on the loan application…. Read the rest of this entry »

I just had to write this post due to the almost daily bad stories I hear involving Wells Fargo’s business practices. Here are two stories from two different perspectives:

The first story is from a real estate agent who, in trying to submit an offer to Wells Fargo for a short-sale encountered utter incompetence on the part of Wells Fargo “work-out department” as they call themselves.

Imagine trying to submit a three-page document to a company which they say is required for a deal to close. You send the fax and then call to verify that the document was received. The person you are faxing says they did not get the fax. You fax it again a couple more times and now they say that they only got two of the three pages in the fax which, by the way, each time you received a successful fax-log report. Read the rest of this entry »

Here we go again. Back about a year ago I wrote a couple of posts about how Wells Fargo Home Mortgage basically abuses their mortgage customers by treating them like fiscal delinquents because they (who does?) pay their mortgages (gasp) later than the 1st of the month but before the 15th. I have to admit that those two posts are the MOST widely read and commented on entries in this entire blog.

Well, they’re at it again. One of the comments I recently received on one of those prior posts had to do with a mortgage customer who sent in an extra mortgage payment with their regular monthly mortgage payment and explained that it was AN EXTRA MORTGAGE PAYMENT. Wells Fargo, in their wisdom, proceeded to put the extra money into “suspense.” Suspense, in this case, is an accounting term meaning, “I don’t know where this money is supposed to go so I’ll just leave it here “in suspense” until I figure out where it’s supposed to go.” Apparently, the people who process payments can’t read. Anyway… Read the rest of this entry »