Critter – I have been lucky… so far the escrows I have had this spring have been solid. We had a liting that closed escrow today on a 100% financed subprime buyer that got 3% back AND another 10k went to a remediation company. It was all above board in the contract.
In order to get hard numbers for you one could do a string search in the MLS for stuff like BOM or back on market or something like that but it is tedious and not scientific. Alternately one could compare the MT verses AMT fields in the listing, (MT – market time, AMT is adjusted market time) and a substantial difference in these fields would indicate a home was active, then went pending, then went active againg indicating a defaulted escrow. Again though you don’t know why they defaulted. So… the answer is that it is speculative. Yes I do believe more homes are falling out of escrow but no I cannot give numbers or reasons why. I do believe standards are tightening.
