Home buyers confused by listing lingo

Q: I'm thinking about moving up. I've just started browsing through real estate listings online. But it seems like every other listing I see has some arcane notation in it. The house descriptors are easy enough to figure out, but there's lots of stuff in there that I don't recall seeing when I bought my first home 12 years ago, and that I don't really get, things like "Not a Short Sale," "REO," "Subj to lender's approval," and the like. What does this stuff mean, and which of these things should I care about?

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