The Bank Stayed Silent for 119 Days on a $214,000 House

Eleven forty at night on February 25, and I had the short sale file open in one browser tab and the seller's agent's cell number open in another, doing math on a napkin about a split-level in Aurora. Day forty-four of bank silence. Our offer had gone in January 12 at $222,000, and since then the file had produced exactly three emails, one of which was a newsletter from a title company. The napkin said we could wait until May before the numbers stopped working.

The clock had teeth on our side too. Our lease in Denver ended March 31, and the month-to-month rate after that was $260 more every single month for a place we had already packed altogether out of. I had extended our rate lock once already, on February 3, for $650. My wife had stopped asking about the house in January and began asking about the lock in February, which is a fair trade.

Everyone warns you the first lien moves slow on a short sale. Nobody warned us about the second one, a $21,500 junior line at Elevations Credit Union that nearly took the whole deal down in April over two thousand dollars. The napkin did not have a column for that. The ten-page approval letter that finally came did.

the listing that said subject to bank approval

The house is a 1969 split-level, 1,860 square feet, listed at $224,900 with the four words every investor skips and every first-time buyer should read twice. Knee-high grass, a green lockbox fuzzy with pollen, and a smell in the rec room that no amount of showing prep was goin' to fix. The seller had relocated to Texas for work in 2024 and stopped paying a $279,000 first mortgage at Chase with a $21,500 Elevations line sitting behind it. Listed since October. Two failed contracts. Two price cuts. We ruled out nothing and offered $222,000 on January 12 with conventional financing, 20 percent down, and a 45-day close, and the seller signed it the same afternoon.

offer number one, January 12

Her agent warned us the bank's clock does not start at the seller's signature, and she was right about the clock. The clock began anyways. Chase ordered a broker price opinion on January 30, and the number came back at $209,000. That was the quiet part, and it took us a full week to understand what it meant: the bank's own agent had priced our offer thirteen thousand dollars too rich. Their approval would land below what we offered, not above it. On a short sale the bank is not a buyer. It is a seller who owes too much and votes anyways.

two negotiators and a dead inbox

Chase's first negotiator answered two emails in January and vanished from the file by February 2. The reassignment notice came February 19, to a man named Marcus, whose introduction included an apology and a forty-day backlog he described as normal. I circled back every eight days like a metronome: status, status, status. Day sixty-one, a Thursday, Marcus sent a message with no words in it, just the file stamped escalated, first escalation, and a new estimated review date in April. I sat with that email for an hour. Silence, in a short sale, is not a no. It is a queue.

the junior lien wanted eight thousand

April opened the real fight. Chase's approval framework allocated net proceeds one way: $198,000 to the first lien and $3,000 to Elevations. Elevations came back wanting $8,000, in writing, with a deadline of its own attached. Three weeks of ping-pong followed, and both banks knew the same fact we did: in a foreclosure, the junior line's $21,500 was worth about zero, so $6,000 beat nothin' even if it felt like an insult. The file sat frozen while the two of 'em stared at each other over two thousand dollars. Nobody moved until a resolution manager told both sides the deal would die of old age first.

four escalations and a manager named dee

Escalation number four went in April 22, and it finally reached a human named Dee who had authority to say words like final. The junior lienholder settled at $6,000 on April 29. Chase's approval letter generated May 8, ten pages, and the price on page one was $214,000, eight thousand under what we had offered, cuz the bank believed its broker over our contract. The letter carried a 30-day fuse. We signed everything inside nine days and gave notice on the storage unit the same hour.

the approval letter ran ten pages

Terms, in plain order: sale at $214,000, $6,000 to the junior line, first lien eating the rest, deficiency waived, seller walking away with nothing and a credit score that will heal. We extended the rate lock a second time for another $650, which hurt more than the first one. Our inspector found a cracked furnace heat exchanger on day 124, and the bank allowed a $2,600 credit off the approved price without anyone renegotiating the letter. That never happens. Dee made it happen with one email and zero adjectives.

day 137 at the title office

We closed May 29, one hundred thirty-seven days after the offer, on a house the bank had been altogether silent about for one hundred nineteen of those days and counting. Done at last. Total noise around the price: $1,300 in lock extensions, $520 in month-to-month rent delta, $540 for the inspection, $2,600 back from the furnace. Two split-levels on the same street have sold since we went under contract, at $259,000 and $263,000.

what we tell people who ask now

The napkin from February 25 is in the file folder with the ten-page letter, and the deed says $214,000. One hundred nineteen days of silence, four escalations, two negotiators, and two thousand dollars of junior-lien theater at the end. The house cost less than either of the two neighbor sales, and the waiting cost about $2,360 all in once you count the locks and the rent delta, which is the entire trade compressed into one sentence. People ask if we would do it again and the answer is boring. We already did. That is it. That is the price of sitting still.