The Joys of the Short Sale

So last Tuesday Jason and I made an offer on the only property around that had everything on our "must have" list.  There are other properties that could work-but they would need a lot of renovation.  There are only two problems with the property, first there was already an accepted offer contingent on the buyer selling their home.  That offer was accepted more than 6 months ago and according to our realtor, they won't be able to sell their home without putting a lot of work into it.  The second issue is that it's a short sale.  A short sale is a sale of real estate in which the proceeds from selling the property will fall short of the balance of debts secured by liens against the property and the property owner cannot afford to repay the liens' full amounts, whereby the lien holders agree to release their lien on the real estate and accept less than the amount owed on the debt (wikipedia).  The owners moved to Kentucky a year ago. 

On Wednesday Jason and I were driving to Oregon so that Jason could go to a class and our realtor called us at 9:01am to tell us that the seller accepted our offer.  Our realtor had told us that probably the earliest we would hear something was Monday, so we were excited to hear so quickly.  The next step, according to our realtor, was to wait and see if the bank accepted the offer and then the previous buyers (the ones with the contingency) would have 48 hours to decide if they wanted to buy the house even though their house hasn't sold. 

Fast forward to this week...On Monday our realtor called us and we had to sign a bunch of paper work that basically said that we aren't related to the owners or going to give the owners any money.  Then the mortgage broker called, the pre-qualification letter wasn't strong enough and the bank wants to see that we can actually afford a mortgage.  So with 24 hours notice we had to get together: 2 years of taxes and W2s, 2 months of pay stubs, 2 months of statements from every bank account, a quote for homeowners insurance, and copies of our driver's licenses.  Here's the silly part-when I put all of our stuff in storage, I put my filing cabinet with all of my tax information in storage.  Luckily for me I had pdfs of my taxes and most of my previous employers quickly emailed me W2s, but I am still waiting on the flakey English institutes that I worked at in 2010.  Luckily the mortgage broker said that he can submit the paperwork and wait for them to ask for those W2s (if they notice they aren't there). 

So now it's a waiting game.  We're waiting to see what the bank says. 

In the meantime on Thursday we move into an apartment while we wait for this all to go down.  It will be tough the leave Hillary and Mark's basement because it's nice to have friends around and a year-old baby to play with.  But at the same time it will be nice to unpack a little, even if we will only be there for a few months. 

If anyone has any tips for dealing with a short sale, please let me know!  We want to get started creating Happy Bear Farms!