St. Louis Real Estate - Mortgage News - Cust. Service

Customer Service or Lack There Of! by Chris Scheer, Branch Manager, Cornerstone Mortgage, O’Fallon, MO

If you have read my previous posting on Manufactured Housing you may be aware of the challenge that I had getting the appraiser to put the Make, Model, serial number and year manufactured on an appraisal of a Manufactured house. The appraisal form clearly states that this information is needed, yet the appraiser we chose to use could not find the information on the property and thus felt it was not his responsibility to locate it. Over a 2 week period my assistant requested the information be added to the appraisal and each time she was told he didn’t have it or have access to it. Since this was one of my first challenges working with this assistant I let her attempt to handle the situation until it became a crisis. I recognize I should have stepped in sooner, but until you see someone perform under fire you don’t know how good they are.

At the eleventh hour I went to the Internet and found the source of the information within 10 minutes. Prior to doing that I sent an e-mail to the managing partner of the appraisal company that was very direct and to the point, see the following:

“We have a challenge. As you are aware, we have asked the appraiser to supply the Manufacturer’s serial number, name, trade/model and date manufactured for the property on xxxxx road. At this time this is the only item I need to get a clear to close, however, we will not close until we have it. In the appraisers defense, the realtor and her clients went through the entire house tonight and could not find it. However, since there is the HUD certification label #RAD730051 as per his appraisal, this should be the basis to track down the required information. If the realtor manages to find this information then the appraiser looks bad. If we manage to find this information, then the appraiser looks bad. If HUD provides it, he still looks bad, but not as bad. If he finds it, then he gets off the hook. See the challenge? I realize that this is extra work and frustrating for everyone. However we have a client who is trying to purchase a home and helping them achieve their goal is what we do. Feel free to call me if you have any questions or comments.”

I have inserted “the appraiser” and “realtor” where the names were in the correspondence. I received no reply to this e-mail from the appraiser and when I was contacted that day by the appraiser to review the value on another property nothing was mentioned of the e-mail until I brought the situation up. The defense of the appraiser was that no other lender had ever requested this information and he felt it was not his responsibility. I reiterated that the underwriter requested that the appraiser complete this section of the appraisal, therefore at that time it becomes the appraisers responsibility. He continued to contend that since he couldn’t find it then it wasn’t his job to get it. When I explained how easy it was for me to obtain, he asked why I didn’t do that sooner. It became a circle of discussion with me telling him what I expected as the client and him saying that he wouldn’t do it. Later that day I addressed the situation with one of the other principals at the company whom the e-mail was sent to and he defended his partner. Going further to say that we didn’t know what we were doing.

I appreciate a business partner defending his associates, but at the point that you have a client telling you that you screwed up and that what was being requested was not out of the ordinary for our industy. . . this is not the stance to take if you want to keep the relationship. As the lender I have a choice of the appraisers I choose and the stance this company took will keep them from getting any more of my business.

For questions or comments on this post, please contact Chris Scheer at chrisscheer@stlouisrealestatevocie.com

Tags: Manufactured+Homes, HUD, Appraiser, Realtor, Customer+Service

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 8:59 am and is filed under First Time Home Buyer, For Buyers, For Sellers, Mortgage News, Real Estate News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.