[quote=Rich Toscano]I don’t think it was a myth right after the crash. There were a ton of homes in various stages of foreclosure that had not hit the market yet. That was the shadow inventory: homes that we knew were eventually coming to market, but that hadn’t yet shown up yet in the inventory stats.
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The part that was a myth right after the crash, and we continued to hear it for years afterwards, was that lenders were secretly hiding their inventory, or at very least intentionally holding on to inventory until after the market recovered. They never did that. They were just (and remain) that horribly incompetent at managing distressed assets.
