1. I believe that shadow inventory is bank owned homes being kept off the market. Extending it to homeowners who would like to sell, aren’t distressed but choose to not sell in this market, that has always existed, in more places than housing, that’s just buyer/seller sentiment. I also see significantly less brown lawn vacants that have already been taken back by banks just sitting forever unlisted, everyone that I stalked for nearly three years, did list and sell eventually, time lines varied, but now the brown lawns are so much more scarce in my hood than they were two years ago or a year ago. You can say it is a local thing but bank/governemnt conspiracy theories make no mention of zip code bias so I can extend my local research to the broader market on this issue.
2. using the foreclosure radar or other service to compare active listings and the total hits from the pay site, in the example it was 4 to 1 (1600 hits to 400 something listings). We’ve had this argument about the differences of the pay sites, their protocols, their stale and orphaned data and the vast differencs between the sites. Bad data leads to bad conclusions. The one consiracy theory I do believe is that pay sites exaggerate their data.
Maybe everything else is correct, I don’t know but once I see an argument based on something I have personally fact checked and disproved, I tend to ignore the rest. I’m silly that way
One other observation, while I know people who have lasted a long time not paying or gaming the system and playing the loan mod/short sale extendo game, I’ve also seen people get tossed quickly or at least the traditional timeline, it may have to do with who the servicer is and how good or backed up they are. We had a poster a few weeks back wanting to know if there was any recourse for their friend who was getting tossed in something like 3 months and felt cheated that he didn’t get the free 18 months he hears about.
