I've been through this process. You're right, it's not fun. We used to live in Florida. Received an invitation to serve on the pastoral team of the church where I currently serve. We ended up doing a short sale. Was a scary experience. We paid a little over $200k for the house. It ended up selling for just a little over $100k. Sigh. What was even more stressful, though, is that one week after we closed on the short sale, we received a foreclosure notice in the mail. Apparently, different departments at the bank were at work without speaking to each other. Thankfully, we were able to show them the short sale papers and they didn't foreclose. By God's grace, never again.