Lenders have little incentive to breeze through short sale
entitled to, the lender requires the attorneys in the transaction to limit what they can charge, and certain fees and expenses will not be allowed by the lender. You can see how everyone involved has to kick in cash to get the deal done, so frequently, few people come out happy after a short sale.
When an owner applies for a short sale, the lender will ask for a ton of paperwork. Sometimes it seems that the lender asks for more paperwork in a short sale than when the borrower took out the loan. Once the lender gets the paperwork, it will put a huge amount of time verifying the details of the short sale, often a lot more time than when the borrower applied for the loan.
When the lender gives a borrower a loan, the lender expects to make money on the loan. Now that the lender needs to approve the short sale and wants to minimize that loss, the lender will comb through the paperwork looking at where the borrower might be hiding money, trying to determine whether this borrower can actually pay for the shortage. Doing all that takes time, and the lender may have different layers of people looking at documents and then approving everything.
If the lender has turnover, you may find that there are different people to deal with at every stage in the short sale process. As new people filter in, they have to get up to speed on the deal, and that can take even more time.
The system isn’t perfect and it eats up time. The more money the lender will lose, the more time it may take to process and approve the short sale. At the end of the day, just when you think you’re almost done, the lender may consider whether foreclosure could end up giving the lender a better result.
The only advice we can give you is to keep pushing the lender to make a decision. And, hopefully, your short sale will close.