"Securities for this order were not immediately available for short sale. The order will be held while we attempt to locate the securities." This is the message you receive on IB when IB cannot locate shares to borrow. Do you agree that on IB there is nothing more to do in this situation to locate shares. You cannot pay a locate fee in order to get shares to borrow in this situation since with IB the locate fee is build into the borrow fee that you pay when you borrow the shares, correct? So you pay a higher borrow fee on hard to borrow shares. But when you receive the message above, you cannot do anything else on IB other than wait.
Correct. That order will sit in a queue till they are available. If that is a limit order, you may get filled at a worse than limit price once shares are located.
You should check BEFORE, because the availability can override the setup. It is good to monitor the availability status for a few days before shorting to get a feel for availability. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/trading/short-securities-availability.php Or Pre borrow the shares https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/general/education/videos/pre-borrow-us-stocks-shorting.php