There are 4 stages in a short sale transaction:

1. Offer solicitation stage I
This stage is controlled by the seller and time frame shall be as short as possible. A good agent shall be able to help you price your house to get offers within a week the house is listed on the market.

2. Lender approval stage
This stage is controlled by the lenders and can be anywhere from 2 months to 6 months depending on who the lenders are and how many lenders (liens) are on the property.

3. Offer solicitation stage II
By the time we get the short sale approvals from the lenders few months after the house was initially listed, most likely we lost all the offers to purchase the house. We will need to start the offer solicitation stage again with the new price that is approved by the lenders. Most offers come in at this stage will be substantially below the lender's approval price so we may need to counter offer back and forth between the buyers and the lenders. The counter offer process may take up to couple of months since lender's approval process is very slow.

4. Escrow Stage
Once an offer is accepted by the seller and approved by the lenders, we open escrow. This will take approximately one month.

As you can see, sellers need to price the house aggressively in order to receive offers within first week the house is on the market in order to minimize time required on selling the property.

I am an experienced short sale agent who can help you negotiate non-deficient judgments on your liens whenever possible to minimize damage to your credit and sell your house successfully. Please call Caroline Tsou at (626) 922-8408 if you are interested in short selling your property.