"At one point that represented half our sales," said Mike Toste, a Roseville-based Coldwell Banker agent who did them then – and now. "That's going to happen," he said this week.

Sacramento Association of Realtors statistics show that short sales are almost 25 percent of home sales now in Sacramento County and the city of West Sacramento.

The beauty of the Treasury Department's new program, Toste said, is it puts people that banks reject for loan modifications on a faster track for short sales. The lender's modification unit simply hands them over to the short-sale unit.

"They're saying the response times will be quicker. They will have already done the due diligence," he said.

That offers hope in a market where short sales represent a huge percentage of the houses with for-sale signs out front.

"They dominate our marketplace. They far outnumber the bank repos and conventional sales," said Erin Attardi, a Sacramento-based Lyon Real Estate agent.

Toste and Attardi say Bank of America can still be difficult on short sales, while Wells Fargo and GMAC are getting better. The best, said Attardi, is the Wells Fargo subsidiary Wachovia: "Wachovia has a person in Sacramento who pays visits to the homeowners."

Short sales are often the best way out for homeowners who bought or refinanced during the boom and now owe $100,000 or more than their home is worth. The credit damage isn't as bad as foreclosure or a walkaway. And it's cheaper for the bank to accept a short sale than to foreclose and resell the house in a market where prices have barely stabilized.

Toste said Sacramento's housing market floundered for about three years in the 1990s before banks finally got comfortable with short sales.

"This is about the same timing of the cycle," he said. "They've now got the proper staffing at banks. … and they have new (technology) platforms to work with."

It's not the first time a predicted wave of short sales has failed to materialize. As the newest government pro- gram arrives, plenty of people hope this one's for real.