NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- 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.

In a short sale, a homeowner who cannot keep up with their loan asks the lender to take a dollar amount less than what is owed on a home's mortgage, and forgive the remainder of the unpaid debt.

So if a borrower has a mortgage balance of $100,000 and finds a seller who will pay $95,000 for the house, the lender agrees to accept that $95,000 and close out the loan.

"There was a much greater chance of success with these in the past," said LeGate

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.

But most buyers can't, or won't, wait that long."That's been our biggest challenge - keeping the buyers interested long enough as we wait and wait for an answer," said Jeff Morrell, a Colorado Springs real estate agent who specializes in short sales.

John Fitzmorris, a short-sale expediter in East Stroudsburg, Penn., was working with Robson and Laura Pereira, who were behind on their mortgage, to market their home before a foreclosure would take it away.

"She worked, but he had a construction business that went defunct," said Fitzmorris. "That put them in trouble."

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