Despite the wealth of data we have at our fingertips these days, evaluating a property for sale can be as much an art as a science. This is especially true in Ann Arbor, Michigan where prices can fluctuate by tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars between a house in Dexter and a house a mile down the road in Chelsea. Even within a single community, prices are all over the board, with the curve being thrown off by foreclosures and short sales on one end and people trying to sell a house in a down market at the price they paid at the top of the market at the other. The BPO, or Broker Price Opinion, is a tool used by lenders and mortgage companies to value properties in situations where they believe the expense and delay of an appraisal is not necessary. Real estate brokers are given an order to do a BPO by the lender, mortgage company or loss mitigation company. The broker does either a Drive By BPO or an Internal BPO in most cases. Bpo’s are limited in scope and are not appraisals. With the amount of bank real estate owned properties, the demand for broker’s price opinions has escalated whereby some agents are making a living from this income source alone. In fact, some agents are surviving because of the requests for the broker’s price opinions. For a short sale, this is the last requested data before the file is handed to the investor for a decision on approval. I had one property where the broker’s price opinion was rejected 4 times. The brokers could not find comps within the parameters set by the bank. They wanted comps within a certain geographic area and there were none. No sales means no comps, so agent broadened the scope and went outside of the defined one mile area, so the bank rejected the work. The next time the bank rejected the work because the gross living allowance (GLA) or square feet of the comps chosen was different from the subject by over 10 percent. Again, there were no comparables to choose from and this was rejected. The next time the bank sent an agent out to the property to re- do the brokers price opinion (now 4 months along in the process), the agent still had no comparable sales to use within their small allowable scope, they did the best they could by including what they could and submitted it to the bank and again it was rejected because the agent went farther back in time than the allowable 4 months. When I addressed this with the loss mitigation supervisor, we agreed that this was definition of insanity – this process.  If there are have been NO sales within their narrow geographic scope and time line and square foot allowance, how would we ever be able to close?  This was not the sellers, buyers, agents fault; could the bank expand their limits? Their ANSWER – NO. So what could have been completed within 30 days has dragged on for months. We had 2 pending sales and one complete sale that were sufficient to provide an acceptable bpo for the first lien holder. We are now the happy recipients of an approval letter for the first lien holder.  So now we go back to the second lien holder to get an extension again. The good news is the second lien holder does not want another broker’s price opinion, just more bank statements and pay stubs from the seller. We will see how long it takes to read those – so far they have had them for 10 days with no word. Persistence is the operative here. This will get finalized! Find all Ann Arbor Area Homes and Condos for Sale.