Another purchase closing delayed

I participated in a purchase closing today that should have gone better than it did. We started closing about a half hour late and ultimately got the purchase closed and funded. Fortunately the sellers had already had their purchase closing a week earlier so this delay really didn't inconvenience anyone too terribly bad. That said, It was troubling to me to be the quarterback on a deal that got delayed, especially since we had our clear-to-close and good-to-go 5 days before. So what happened?

The lender I used, who I picked because of their phenomenally low rates has a policy of getting a verbal VOE (verification of employment) 24 hours before closing. All they need to do is get someone from the company on the phone who will verify that the borrower is still working there. Seems easy enough right? Wrong.

What happens if the lender calls the company for the VOE and the only person who can provide that information is gone for the day. Hard to believe in a company with thousands of employees that only one person can verify employment, but in this case it was true.

No big deal, just call the company first thing in the morning and everything will be fine as the closing package is all ready to go, the lender simply needs the VOE to release it. The closing isn't scheduled until 10:00a.m. so it won't be a problem, right? Wrong.

What if the next morning, bright and early your lender calls the employer and gets voice mail? We'll you say, simply leave a voice mail and they will call you right back, after all, the HR person probably doesn't have much else going on, right?

OK, so now it is 9:30a.m. and we still don't have our VOE or the closing package. The client is calling, the title company is calling, things are starting to heat up. So I ask my assistant, who is really good at her job, to try to get through to a decision maker so we can get or VOE and close this on time.

Oh she gets through alright only to have someone in HR tell her they do not do verbal VOEs and that we will need to send them the VOE as a document, and someone will fill it out and get it back to us in 7-10 days. Which is sort of a problem for us since we are scheduled to close this purchase loan in about 10 minutes.

So how did it finally end you ask? My assistant was able to get the HR person on the phone and explain the urgency of the situation and how it would have been difficult to plan ahead as this last event was lender driven and it is their policy to check for employment 24 hours before the close. Some how this person was able to miraculously give us our VOE in a matter of minutes and we were able to sit down and close only 30 minutes behind schedule.

So what's the lesson learned here? I think it is a lesson I have learned about 50 time in this business which is no matter how well prepared you or the other parties to a closing are, it never fails that something can and/or will go wrong and it's not about who's fault it is or who is to blame, but how can we quickly resolve the issue and get the job done.