There’s been a lot of questions asked about short sales, are they good deals, are they for real, how long will it take to buy, are they even able to be bought? The answers I have seen have been pretty consistent over the last couple of years….but I’ve never seen anyone put up the hard numbers of where their claims came from, it’s mostly just been from personal experience or anecdotal evidence. So I looked them up.
In the Orlando Metropolitan area (Orange, Seminole, Polk, Osceola, and Lake Counties where search)
-There are currently 8,088 identified short sale properties available for sale. With an average days on market of 178 days
-There are 7,633 short sales in pending status (meaning there is an accepted offer on the property, they are just waiting for bank approval to close). With an average days on market of 140 days
-There have been another 5,883 short sales withdrawn from the market in 09’ (there could be many reasons for withdrawal….but most li
kely the property went into foreclosure)
-And the most telling number is that only 3,873 short sales that have actually sold in 2009, with average days until CLOSING of 178 days.
It’s hard to gauge an exact percentage of how many short sales actually sell in 09’ from these numbers but looking at the numbers myself, in the best case scenario it looks like only 1 in 3 short sales will ever close. What do you think the numbers show?
From personal experience, the number 1 reason by far short sales don’t close is the impatience of the buyer or the seller in the process. Six months is a VERY long time to wait on a property. So if considering a short sale, prepare for the LONG HAUL, and run away from a listing agent can say they can get an approval in only a couple weeks….unless they can produce a recent letter FROM THE BANK that shows they already approved the asking price; never take their word for it.
The close second that I’ve seen that prevents short sales from closing, are bad, incompetent, less experienced, less educated agents that do not understand how short sales work or what the best ways are to handle the short sale procedure. From not knowing how to send a clean and complete short sale package to a bank, to listing or accepting offers at prices WAY below market. There hundreds of little things that need to be PLACED correctly (nothing falls into place conveniently on short sales) to have a sale go through in even the average time frame.
If you have patience, by no means eliminate short sales from your list of possibilities. But go in eyes open, be sure your agent knows what red flags to look for, be protected going into the deal, and be prepared for failure even if everything is done perfectly. The same goes for sellers, get an experienced agent, it will be a long and arduous process, nohting is speedy 
so have patience and never give up!