The Man Who Saved the Deal

Recently, I was involved in a short sale transaction on the buyer side. It was quite a roller coaster, to say the least. It took four months to complete the deal from offer to closing. No less than four times, we thought the deal was dead...but somehow we kept managing to shock the tired heart of it back to life for another go until at last it was completed.

I must give credit where credit is due. One man with extraordinary skills and drive singlehandedly saved the deal. He saved the buyers from having to find a less desireable house at a much higher interest rate, saved the sellers from foreclosure, and saved the commissions for the agents involved.

The man is a mortgage broker. I admit I was not sold on the idea of having a mortgage broker until he proved he really could beat any other quote we obtained...so we figured we would give him a try. Delays, unreturned voicemails, and a failed attempt at closing did not deter the man who saved the deal.

Things were coming down to the wire. Two different nationwide banks had to approve the short sale. We had approval from the first bank. The second bank also approved the deal, but by the time they did so, the first banks' approval had expired. We only had about 3 business days to get a re-approval from the first bank. And we were not optimistic, since the first bank took 60 days to approve the deal the first time.

The timing could not have been worse. The bank we needed the approval from was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. A 500-year flood was in the process of drowning a great portion of that city when our deal came down to the wire.

The man who saved the deal is persuasive and relentless. He called our contact person's voicemail. Voicemail box was full; unable to leave a message. He got the physical address of the building and somehow got the local phone extension for the buildings security office. Thrilled to finally talk to a live person, the mortgage broker tried to explain the gravity of our one little deal to a man whose city was underwater. Think about that.

Our contact person at the mega-bank wasn't in the office; she was filling sandbags to help save someone else's house. Maybe her own. Our mortgage broker persuaded the security guard, phone in hand,  to walk the halls of the building and find a real person in the loss mitigation department who could help us. The security guard found someone and passed the phone off. Our mortgage broker convinced him to re-approve the deal the same day. Again, he convinced the loss mitigation specialist to do this the same day, when for all we know the loss mitigation specialists' home was underwater.

The man who saved the deal accomplished in one day what several others could not do in weeks. Others used conventional means -- the front door -- leaving voicemails for the specific person assigned to our deal and then waiting for her to get back to us. Given the workload of loss mitigation people, we were hesitant to call and badger them for fear they would move our deal to the bottom of the pile. The man who saved the deal thought outside the box; he used his powers of negotiation and persuasion in ways that did not even occur to others such as me.

This person took very little credit for the work that saved the deal. He is unfailingly modest but deserves most of the credit for saving one very trying deal singlehandedly.

The man who saved the deal is Hoa Nguyen of Ideal Financial Services.

Thanks Hoa. I've learned a lot from you in the past few months. Let's do this again, but next time it will go more smoothly, OK?

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