In February, we were contacted by a unit owner in a 6-unit condominium in Chicago.  His condominium’s FHA approval was due to expire in June.  He had read my article about FHA concentration and had some questions.  After speaking to me, he said that he wanted to hire us to handle the recertification.

Fast forward a couple of months and he retained us.  We sent him the questionnaire and requested the necessary documents.  We didn’t hear back from him for several weeks.

On May 26 when we sent a routine follow-up, he called me in a panic.  Apparently, once he signed the retainer agreement and sent us the check, he thought that it was just done.  The approval was due to expire on 6/10/15 and he has one, possibly two, pending sales to FHA buyers that could be in jeopardy if it doesn’t get approved quickly.

We re-sent the questionnaire and checklist to him, but we broke down exactly what we needed and told him to ignore items that we don’t need.  We went online and downloaded all of the legal documents that we needed for submission (it cost us $6.50, by the way).  The package was complete May 29th and overnighted to HUD in Atlanta.

On June 4, I received a call from the unit owner asking if he was seeing things.  He said that the condominium was updated as approved in FHA’s system and wanted me to verify the information.  He was correct.  The Atlanta Homeownership Center (HOC) had received the file on Monday June 1st, logged it in their system on Tuesday and approved it on June 4th.  The unit owner could not have been happier.

This is certainly not a typical timeframe but for this unit owner, it couldn’t have been timelier, pun intended.

Current processing times for the FHA Homeownership Centers are:

Philadelphia: 3 weeks
Atlanta: 2 weeks
Santa Ana: 3 weeks
Denver: 2 ½ weeks

Top Photo Credit: (c) Can Stock Photo / imphot