I am currently dealing with a short sale right now.  For those of you who do not know what a short sale is, (here is a short summary) it is when the lender of the seller's house is going to loose money when the home is sold to the buyer.  This happens when the mortgage for the house is over the market value for the house. 

An example is like the transaction that I am doing: The loan on the house is at $400,000 (when the market was good, the home owners went to their loan officer and had their house refinanced and cashed out $400,000), but in today's market, the house is only worth and was appraised at $314,000!  This is shocking and disheartening to the home owners, but what can they do? It's a buyer's market...right?  Well, that is a short sale in a nut shell.  In my transaction of which I am representing the buyer, the original lender for the property stands to loose almost $100,000 but this is still better for them than going through with a foreclosure.  A foreclosure would cost them more money and loose more time than a short sale, in most cases.

Well in my transaction, we have been at this for almost 4 months now!  At first we were negotiating the prices, then we were negotiating the terms, now we have everything in place, my buyers are qualified and have their loan ready to go, their down payment in the bank, and now the whole deal is being held up because the seller's lender has fired most of its workers (due to the subprime mess) and needs to reassign the person working on our file!  Well I'm in that waiting period right now and do not no, have no clue of when they will assign a new person to work on our transaction.  It's been almost 4 months into this deal and we don't know when it will close.

I guess I will have to keep on the up side and hope for the best.  I will keep you posted.