Short Sales Processing Time to Become Shorter?

I just got an email from the President/CEO of our local Realtor® organization about Bank of America’s new plan to shorten the response time to offers on a short sale to 20 days! If this does really happen and other banks start to follow their lead, then it will make the purchase of a short sale in more cases a viable situation (not holding my breath but stranger things have happened).

Here are some excerpts from the email:

Thanks to input from Florida Realtors®, Bank of America is set to roll out a NEW short sale process and documents designed to reduce the approval process to 20 days.

The new process will begin as of April 14th (more likely it will be April 16th since the 14th is on a Saturday) and they will require 5 specific forms if a short sale is initiated with an offer.

Here is some more on this from the email (Equator is the online system that Realtors have to use when dealing with Bank of America on short sales):

• New timeframes – salespersons will have five days to submit a counteroffer in Equator. Bank of America is limited prospective buyers to two counteroffers. Responses will be given within three days.
The changes are so extensive that the Equator platform will be down for 10-12 hours during the overnight hours starting Friday, April 13. However, if all goes as planned, Bank of America hopes to reduce the timeline from offer to approval/decline to 20 days!

It will take some time to find out if this will get the results they hope to, but if it does it will definitely help both sellers and buyers tremendously and will make the whole short sale process a little less painful.  But let’s see what happens….