Distressed Inventory Report

By George Thurtle

I am starting a new weekly tracking report similar to the “Weekly Scorecard” which appears on Mondays. The “Distressed Inventory” report takes the number of foreclosures from zipcodes 98005, 98007, and 98008 and inventories the number of foreclosed homes and the number of homes which have had the notice of Trustee Sale recorded. These zip codes roughly correspond to MLS Area 530. I will do this report on Saturday as all the notices are filed in King County at the Auditor’s office on friday. The reason for doing this report is that the amount of distressed inventory is what drives pricing ultimately. Sellers who are forced to sell basically have to keep lowering prices to find a sale in tight market conditions. How these numbers play out is an indication of future market direction. Recently we have see in East Bellevue the amount of distrssed inventroy be significantly reduced the last few months. However as we discussed earlier, lenders tend to meter out this inventory since they cannot take the negative impacts on earnings all at once. The lenders will look at their quarterly numbers and then decided how much to write off against those numbers. These numbers are only indended for directional purposes and could be refined a lot more such as average price of the foreclosed homes and days since foreclosure but I have found like Quantum Mechanics the more information about the state of the object the less information about the overall direction and that is what we are looking for the overall direction. We will keep these numbers weekly and start doing graphs to give an idea of overall trends.

July 26-09
98005
New Foreclosure 0
Foreclosed 7
New Trustee Sale Notice 2
Trustee Sale Notice 28

98007
New Foreclosure 0
Foreclosed 1
New Trustee Sale Notice 0
Trustee Sale Notice 15

98005
New Foreclosure 0
Foreclosed 10
New Trustee Sale Notice 1
Trustee Sale Notice 26

Total New Foreclosure 0
Total Foreclosed 18
Total New Trustee Sale 3
Total Trustee Sale Notice 69

Ratio of foreclosed/trustee sale 0.26

MLS 530 Bank Owned 2
MLS 530 Short Sale 21

You will see a section was added at the bottom for the MLS 530 listed bank and short sale inventory to give an idea of the present inventory listed versus the actual inventory on King County Records. The point here is to give an idea of potential future inventory to be listed. A few weeks data will be necessary to get an idea of how all this tracks. The ratio of foreclosed/trustee sale notice gives an idea of the homes yet to go through foreclosure versus those foreclosed. The number above shows about four times as many homes are posted for a Trustee’s Sale than are actually foreclosed. As an example if the number was 1.00 that would mean a point where the homes heading to foreclosure would be the same as those foreclosed. This would indicate a decline in the distressed inventory. Keep in mind some of the homes showing their notice of Trustee’s Sale may be sold as short sale and sold prior to the Trustee’s Sale. This ratio can be a key indicator of market trends.

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