Those paying attention are seeing realtors continuing to commit short-sale fraud, and about the only hope for it to end is for short sales themselves to run out of steam.  If the debt-tax relief doesn’t get extended (unlikely but possible) and those underwater sense an appreciating-market, we could see short sales go away.

This was one failed attempt – the realtor initially priced this short-sale listing at $475,000, only to raise it to $627,000 once his phone lit up like a Christmas tree.

The mortgage industry has been slow to react, but this article (free w/registration) mentions one paragraph of hope too:

Another developing practice is to look for pricing patterns with realtors. One red flag is when certain Realtors are consistently involved in transactions for properties that sell well below market value. This can indicate that the realtor is providing below-market-value BPOs to influence the asking price.

Could we be done with short sales in the next year or so?

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