In the second half of last year, 4989 homes were sold at Trustee Sale: 4820 homes were returned to lenders and 169 homes were purchased by a third party. That is quite a bit, considering that if each one of those homes were now on the MLS, we’d have 25% more listings (24000 instead of 19201), and if each of these homes had been sold instead we’d have 50% more sales (15000 instead of 10870 resales in H2 last year). So we definitely have a foreclosure problem, in terms of the numbers involved.
What happened to these 4820 homes returned to the lender in the second half of last year? I searched the MLS for “bank owned” in the remarks field, and found 816 sold in H2, and 914 are currently for sale, for a total of 1730 bank owned homes. Where are the other 3,170 bank owned homes?
