Liz Lockhart

Bid? Offer? Did you and your agent fill out a formal contract document? Did your agent provide the listing agent with that document in a timely fashion, along with whatever other documents were specified in the listing? Did your agent have an earnest money check from you? Was your offer a clean offer, not contingent upon the sale of another property and one that did not predicate some sort of repairs? In other words, was there something about your offer that would have disqualified you as a buyer of that particular property? If the house, for instance, would not possibly pass FHA standards and you made an offer with FHA financing, your offer may have been set aside in favor of one with a conventional loan.

I am a Fannie Mae listing agent, and I find that would-be buyers who do not get the properties they seek often accuse the REO listing agent of not submitting their offer. It happens so often, in fact, that I now routinely print the offer screen before I hit the SUBMIT button and file that document away for future reference.

The only contract that actually gets sent to Fannie Mae is the prevailing contract, and that only happens after several additional documents have been gathered; so your contract form absolutely is NOT at FM. Your offer is represented only by a one-page computer submission. Your acquaintance at FM must have access to the asset manager's computer files to determine whether or not your offer was submitted.

Chris, you never came back and answered any of the questions or updated this entry. Does that mean that you ended up being wrong? Was the winning offer better than yours? Did you discover that your offer was submitted, after all? Did it turn out that your offer was incomplete? - Fri Jul 17 2009, 23:29