Banks costing themselves (and shareholders) more money by delaying short sales

According to an article at CNNMoney.com, lenders which delay responding to short sale requests are costing themselves much more as homes needlessly go into foreclosure:

Banks say they want to help troubled homeowners, but they are delaying deals that could save everyone - including the lenders themselves - a lot of time and money.

Lenders are taking much longer than necessary to approve short sales, according to Duane LeGate, of House Buyers Network, a short sale specialist...

Ideally in a short sale, everyone wins. Borrowers avoid the ugly foreclosure process that destroys their credit, while lenders recoup more of their costs than they would by spending the time and money it takes to kick an owner out and resell the property.

Lenders typically lose about 19% of a mortgage's value in a short sale, according to Clayton Holdings, a Conn.-based, provider of loan analytics, while they lose an average of 40% on loans that go into foreclosure.

Coldwell Banker CEO Jim Gillespie agrees that short sales are taking too long to complete. And he speaks from firsthand experience; a short-sale offer he made on a house in Marin County, Calif. in late fall didn't win approval until April...

The difficulty in getting short sales approved stems from the same hurdles facing all the other foreclosure prevention efforts. The fact that the majority of mortgages are pooled and securitized makes it hard to get approval to change the terms of the mortgages.

"It has to do with who owns the loan," said LeGate. "If a mortgage is stuck in a pool somewhere, when something goes wrong, no one knows who the actual owner of the note is."

Additionally, the volume of troubled borrowers makes it hard for lenders to keep up. The housing crisis has put an enormous burden on mortgage servicers, the companies that manage loans for securities investors.

At many servicers, said LeGate, "There's no one really skilled at loss mitigation, and these guys have more work than they were prepared to do."

And with foreclosure filings breaking new records each month, there's no sign that this problem will ease any time soon.

Translation: we still need actual some leadership on this issue.