NationStar and Homesearch.com Auction

HomeSearch is an online auction site for real estate.

The business practice's used by HomeSearch are highly devious.

For example, if you are a homeowner with a NationStar serviced mortgage and you accept an offer to do a short sale on your property, NationStar will not honor that offer.  Once your agent submits the short sale offer to NationStar, the servicer will require you to sign an agreement that will force you to participate in their short sale validation program.  If you do not sign the agreement, then you short sale will be denied.  Once your short sale is denied, then you will no longer have any legal protections from foreclosure.  NationStar will be legally cleared to move forward with the foreclosure process at whatever timeline that they choose.  Another tactic that NationStar will use is to take advantage of the homeowners distressed situation by verbally telling them that they can qualify for a loan modification when they know that they will not qualify.  They will tell the homeowner that in order to participate in the loan modification program, they will have to cancel the short sale.  Once the homeowner cancels the short sale, then the legal protections that the homeowner has against foreclosure are waived.  A month or so later, the loan modification is denied and NationStar has a clear path to foreclose on the homeowner.

NationStar argues that the point of the short sale validation program is to ensure that their investor is getting a fair market value for the short sale.  The short sale validation program consists of placing the home on auction using homesearch and in an ideal situation, the fair market value is obtained using the bidding process.

Well, this leads to another issue from the buying end.  Homesearch uses artificial bids in order to bid the sale price up.  When you register as a buyer on homesearch.com then you will have to sign a document called an event agreement.  In this event agreement, you will find a section that authorizes the auctioneer to place bids on behalf of the seller.  These bids that are placed by the auctioneer are placed with no intention of buying.  The only purpose that these bids serve is to deceive the participants of the auction into thinking that there is demand present for the property.  Now as a buyer, you might be willing to pay $400,000 for a property but if the highest bid on the property is $300,000 and a fake bid is submitted by the auctioneer for $375,000 and you respond to that bid with a $400,000 bid then you have just been fooled into paying an additional $100,000 for a property.    

Please take a look at the following links on Zillow and Trulia to see other people's experiences when working with homesearch.com:

Trulia
Zillow
Additional Info Regarding Experiences with Homesearch