George Bernard Shaw said that, “ The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
How important is good communication if you are a realtor, lender or title company? I would say it is absolutely critical. Certainly communication is a vital component of any type of transaction, no matter what business a person may be in, but, in a real estate deal, there are more individuals involved than most other situations. In a typical deal , the buyer’s agent is dealing with the title company processor who is dealing with their closer, the buyer is talking to their loan officer who is dealing with their loan processor and loan closer who is dealing the processor and closer at another title company who is dealing with the listing agent who is dealing the seller and on and on and on and on.
And what if there are multiple sellers or even normal purchasers who are married to each other? Then you can have each spouse communicating separately and potentially provide conflicting or confusing information. It’s enough to make you retire early and start a landscaping business.
Anyway, back to George Bernard Shaw’s quote above and my point in sharing it. How many times have you perhaps had a client, or a buyer, or a seller confused about some info they have received or were supposed to receive and then talk to the person who they dealt with and had that person say, “Well, that’s not what I told them”, or “I have already given them that” or something to that effect. It’s a very common scenario.
This sort of thing was brought to mind by a deal we just closed. The buyer was getting a loan from a local bank and was also represented by a lawyer. The seller was closing at another title company. The lawyer emailed the lender and asked them “send me the deed for my re-view”. So they emailed back very promptly and said, “Attached is the deed”. They lawyer replied back, “No, I want to see the deed” and copied the closer. Both the closer and lender replied back, “The deed was attached to the previous email.
The lawyer emailed the agent and got the same response. This back and forth was a 2 day affair and totally ridiculous, by the way. The lawyer wanted to see the GENERAL WARRANTY DEED conveying title to his client, the buyer. The lender had, instead, emailed the lawyer the lender’s DEED OF TRUST FORM as often times lenders and closers refer to the Deed of Trust as the “deed” and was under the “illusion that it (communication) had taken place”, when clearly it had not. (of course the lawyer could have been more specific) Needless to say, everyone was exasperated.
The lesson is, it is important to be specific, especially when sending emails and texts to realize that buyers, sellers and in this case lawyers, don’t know lender/title company/real estate lingo. They probably don’t know that a “waiver” is an “Assent to Execution of Deeds and Waiver of Marital Rights”. Or what a “CD” is in our business. We deal with these thing s and a lot more technical industry “stuff” every-day so it’s easy to forget that people we deal with may have no idea what we are talking about which can create frustration, confusion and unnecessary delays like the example above. Well, I feel better getting this out of my system and, as a result, will table the landscaping business for the time being. Hope you all have a great June!