The short sale timeline can vary depending on five basic things:
1. The number of liens on the property.
2. The party who holds those liens. (FHA, PMI, HOA, etc)
3. The performance of the buyer closing once the sale is approved.
4. The cooperation of the seller providing the necessary paperwork in a timely manner.
5. The expertise and follow-through of the person negotiating, processing the paperwork, and handling the sale.
The average short sale takes between two and six months. In a perfect world you can get them done sometime between two and four months. It usually takes 30 to 60 days after submitting a COMPLETE short sale package, including an offer, before the bank assigns a loss mitigator. After that you can expect approximately 30 days to complete negotiations. Once an agreement has been made at all approvals have been obtained, you can expect the process to take approximately another 30 days to close.
If you have received a Notice of Trustee's Sale you can expect the sale date to have to be postponed several times. When a trustee’s sale is rapidly approaching it can be extremely stressful. The lender is not required to postpone the sale. Since it is usually in the best interest of all parties, including the lender, the lender is very likely to be willing to postpone.
Currently loss mitigation departments are short staffed and overloaded with short sale requests. A single loss mitigator or could have up to 200 files to work on. If a complete short sale package is not submitted initially, the bank won’t even look at it. The most important thing for the homeowner to do during the short sale process is to get all paperwork to the realtor complete and promptly. This is the number one cause for delays in the short sale process, and often times these delays will cost the lender to become impatient and just foreclose.
The timeline below should give you a good idea of what to expect during the short sale process. This diagram, however, isn’t all-inclusive. There are several things going on behind the scenes that we will be handling. Click this link for a downloadable copy of the Short Sale Timeline Flowchart.
Remember, every situation is a little bit different. This page is intended to give you an idea of how long the typical short sale will take. Individual results will vary.
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