Countrywide REOs Back to Early 2007 Levels
The Countrywide Foreclosure Blog reports that there are currently 7,017 foreclosed homes being offered for sale on the Bank of America/Countrywide website, down from the peak of 21,500 last November, and back to levels of April 2007 (see chart above, click to enlarge). Below are charts for the individual states that had some of the worst foreclosure problems (CA, AZ, FL and NV), showing significantly reduced levels of lender-owned (REO) properties in June 2009. In all cases except Nevada, the REO levels are at two-year lows and Nevada foreclosures are close to a two-year low.
Comment: This is just one company - although Countrywide was (or still is) the largest mortgage company in the U.S. and financed 20% of home mortgages in 2006 - but doesn't this suggest that the real estate markets are slowly healing and recovering, and gradually returning to normal as the foreclosed properties are sold?
4 Comments:
Are Banks Keeping Foreclosed Homes Off the Market?
Buyers looking to purchase foreclosures should still have plenty of opportunities. Only 30% of bank-owned properties are listed on the multiple listing services, says Rick Sharga, senior vice president at foreclosure listing firm RealtyTrac. He figures banks still own as many as 500,000 properties that they want to sell but haven’t put on the market.
... Banks may also be holding houses off the market because selling them now would lower prices even further. Foreclosures typically sell at a 31% discount to similar homes whose owners aren’t in distress. Listing all those homes now, Sharga says, “would have a devastating impact on inventory and pricing.”
Businessweek
Banks aren't reselling many foreclosed homes
"There is a real danger that there is much more (foreclosure) inventory than we are measuring," said Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Moody's Economy.com in Pennsylvania. "Eventually those homes will have to be dealt with. If they're all put on the market, that will add more inventory to an already bloated market and drive down home prices even more."
[...]
A second DataQuick study of all Bay Area homes repossessed by banks in the 18 months ending January 2009 tracked how many of those homes had resold by mid-March. It found that 65.5 percent had resold. Discovery Bay's ForeclosureRadar.com compared its database of Bay Area foreclosures to MLS listings for the past 120 days and found that fewer than one-fifth of the foreclosures showed up as for-sale listings.
"Foreclosure numbers are artificially depressed," said CEO Sean O'Toole. He puts California's shadow inventory at about 100,000 homes.
San Francisco Chronicle
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I've never understood these "Moratoriums" that supposedly come around. Being in the BPO market, I have never seen PAS stop sending out their Well's Fargo foreclosure notices, nor has B of A stopped foreclosing. I am constantly battling to keep my clients from losing their homes while I'm completing the short sale process for them. I remember B of A supposedly being in a moratorium situation at the exact same time I was BEGGING the negotiator to postpone the sale date. I just don't buy it....
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