You “may” be able to find a hard money lender but you will have to have a pretty good equity stake in the deal. Most hard money lenders will loan on a deal that is 60% ltv. They will give you a 1 year loan at 10-12% and charge a few points. Your goal would be to use the cash then refi and cash out and may them off. So if you wanna take the Turnbull place at 720k, if you came in with half and the hard money guy may come in with half it may get done.

With that said alot of hard money lenders do not like to lend to people purchasing at trustee sale because of potential problems with title after purchase. Still there are some guys out there if you look enough. If you are really serious about it lemme know and I may be able to help you out.

Also realize that there is no correlation between a short sale and a default process. That is they are orthogonal. It is very much the responsibility of the short sale negotiator to make sure that they get in touch with the legal dept at the lender and tell the legal dept that they need to tell the trustee to postpone the trustee sale. This usually happens but sometimes is screwed up.

In the short sale you are in, have your agent ask the listing agent the status of the postponement of the trustee sale. Also if possible you can try to get the name of the trustee and the trustee sale number and call them up to get status.