Thread: How long for a Short sale?

Only time will tell

I have put offers on short sales and after 1 month I received a response...I have head stories of it taking 8+ months on a unit that had 4 mortgages

Originally Posted by jonsmoke

Put an offer on a house(short sale) about 4 months ago. The seller and realtor accepted our offer. Still waiting! The bank did the appraisal about 2 weeks ago and we are still waiting. Question how much longer? And is there anything my realtor is not doing to speed the process? Thanks

4 months seems a bit excessive. The lenders by now have a lot of experience in processing these transactions. In order for a lender to actually start however, they require a LOT of information about the seller and the transaction. I submitted over 80 pages of data to a lender this morning for a short sale offer, and I got an email response on the same day.

Check with your real estate salesperson to see what information the seller has provided and what information the lender is requiring.

ya i have also put an great offer and i got responses on it

I am involved with a short sale at this very moment. The bank (a cororate bank you have heard of) requires 90 days to decide on the offer. The offer is for asking price.. it's been 14 days. I suppose there is no way to tell how long it will take?

I've closed short sales that took 1 month to get approved and 4 months to get approved. They are all different. Hopefully you will get a response soon since the BPO has been done.

As you can tell from some of the other responses, your situation is not out of the norm.

I counsel buyers to avoid short sale homes for just this reason. 3,4,5,6 months is a lot of time to hold your breath, when you're all primed and ready to buy your dream home.

You never know how good a job the seller's agent did in putting together the package the lender needs, in order to consider whether or not it will consider a short sale. Did they include all the documentation the lender needs? Did the lender request additional information, and the homeowner can't find last year's W-2s? As the buyer, and/or the buyer's agent, there's no way of knowing. And if the lender doesn't have all the info they need, they'll just sit on an offer indefinitely.

Sooner or later, lenders are going to become more efficient at processing short sales.... till then, I avoid them, and counsel my clients to do the same.

I figured I would write and update, the short sale took too long so I withdrew the offer and found one that wasn't a short sale. Something came along that wasn't a short sale or foreclosure so it was a good thing we wrote it up so that we could withdraw the offer at anytime.

STILL WAITING! 4months. So get this we were told by the realtor that it was in the process of getting approved but after 2 weeks of nothing(on top of the 4 months) I told her to call the bank directly and go over the selling agents head. So she did and bank said they would get a manager on it. So finally it was going to get handled. WRONG! The bank set the selling agent a emailing stating that they were just in the process of assigning a person to the sale. So they said it would take 5 days to get someone and 14 days to approve the sale. What the heck!! I was pissed and just about fired my realtor! Thing is we love the house and want to wait but this is getting worse. All we want is to see end in sight!!

So seven days came and passed. We called the realtor(again like usual) she said that she talked to the other realtor and the bank said that it is going to take additonal 7 days again to assign someone!! What is going on?? Isnt there some sort of law that could help us?!!! HELP!!!