Interesting article Harry. I was recently asked by someone in a private message to look for certain kind of property in my town and I was a little suprised by the trends, there is almost nothing left that isn’t pending already. Here’s some numbers for my little zip code in the IE, I’, rounding them to even numbers
current nods 600
current nots 50
current foreclosures 400 (these are those still active, dating back to september, the real number is probably lower since they don’t always clean up the data quickly)
Current mls excluding shorts or pending 150
total population about 60k
averave sales are about 150 a month
in 2008, nod/not/foreclosure numbers were double to triple current numbers
in 2008, total listings exceeded a 1,000
current prices are 15-25% higher than a year ago, time on market for market priced isn’t really measured in months, days or weeks, I’d say minutes is the current climate. In my tract, not one house is actually for sale that isnt pending or a short, in the neighboring tract there is only one and it’s priced way too high, 20-30% over market in my estimation.
So if you are a bank, and you are sitting on some empty houses (which are actually becoming rare nowadays) or you have someone who isn’t paying and isn’t going to qual for a program, just give them the boot, take a much smaller loss than you would have last year and sell it as is, in a single day and with a bidding war. I think it’s bounced off bottom but it’s also not going to bounce much more, it’s found it’s balance, 300k still gets you a really nice tract home with a 3 car and over 2000 sq ft, but it’s not going to get to 400k anytime soon so the conditions are perfect for the bank, all of the nods and the nots and the stuff they already have can get turned over as fast as they can take them back, so they should just do it, they wont even hurt prices in the process. In fact, if they get their act together right now on the backlog, they can have the bulk of it hit by spring, right when the buyers start showing up.
I’m sticking to my prediction from a while ago, the worst has passed, it’s not going to shoot up but it’s not going to fall either, flat to mild increase from here on out. At least locally, in my little world.
