The pitfalls of short sales are many. The price is a wishing price, more dependent on how established the mechanisms for actually selling that property short . Have your agent quiz the listing agent on the topic. Ask if they can verify that the short sale has reasonable possibilities of success before spending too much time and energy on it. Has the lender approved the short sale? The price? Is there evidence of this? Are they making progress towards these goals? If not tell them express your interest but with strong language of it being non-binding, if written, and move on. Check back in a month or so. Don’t go getting pre-approval letters every month for a hopeless properties, that can hurt your credit.
Short sales can be fairly cut and dry but it is taking a while for the parties to get up to speed on them in some instances.
SDR has posted some threads on this topic, You can find them in the archives.
Here is a thread I was just looking at that discusses some important issues on the topic.
