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August Numbers

The August numbers are in. Take a look. The pending sales are up and the sold home sales are down slightly. The averages both per sq. ft. sales price and home sales price appear to be flattening out. Looks like we aren’t going down anymore but it doesn’t look like we are going up either.

Tags: 2009, august, Home Sales, Numbers
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Weekly Scorecard 9-7-09

Well the inventory number took a big dive this week down to 249 homes. For weeks the inventories were hovering bewteen 280 and 290. Apparently as homes are selling, unless they are distressed inventory, the present sellers are choosing not to participate in the market. In addition a lot of new construction homes have sold the last couple of months and as everyone has heard before there is no replacement inventory for these homes. This week there was 7 homes sold. One of these was a waterfront lot which had a small tear down cottage so for the averages I have excluded that home. Again the same story, the sold home’s average sales keeps gradually moving up; this week to $567,467 but the per sq. ft. sales price only averaged $219. This number has been stuck at $220 per sq. ft. for the last three months. There was one bank owned home in this bunch the home at 872 164th Pl. NE finally closed after having the sale flip a number of times before. The closed sales price was $235,000. The original list price was $254,900 and the most recent list price was $249,850. The per sq. ft. sales price was $183.59 and the days on market was 198. I guess we won’t have this one to kick around anymore. At least it won’t keep showing up in the pending sales.

Speaking of Pending sales, there were 6 pending sales and there appeared to be no bank owned or short sale inventory. Again the pending sales average per sq. ft. price was $265, well above the average sold price. Now the last three weeks we have had a trend of seeing the pending price price per sq. ft. price above the closed sale price per sq. ft. We will need to see if the discounts from list price continue because as has been noted we still haven’t seen the sold price per sq. ft. move significantly above $220 per sq. ft.

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Distressed Inventory Report 9-5-09

The trend continues with the overall numbers of distrssed inventory holding steady just below 90 but with the number of forclosed homes increasing and the number of those with notices of Trustee Sales decreasing. The number of foreclosed homes is at an all time high since this Report started at 25. The number of Trustee Sales is at an all time low with 63. Looks like some of those short sales are starting to go together.

The big disconnect is the number of foreclosed homes at 25 and the listed “Bank Owned” homes in the NWMLS at 3. Some of this could be due to the agents not disclosing properly a property’s status. If I have time this weekend I could input the addresses of the bank owned homes in the NWMLS against the foreclosed homes of record and see what is really listed and what is not. This would help shed some light on the big disconnect between the very small number of bank owned homes listed and those of record. East Bellevue Foreclosure Report 9-5-09

Tags: 9-5-09, Distressed, forclosure, inventroy, report, trustee sale, Weekly
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Shadow Inventory

Shadow inventory are the homes that the banks are holding off of the market in order to manipulate their balance sheets. It is speculated that this “Shadow” inventory is the next leg down in the residential real estate market. On the surface it does appear there is a disconnect from what is listed to what is on the County records. In the weekly Distressed Property Report last Saturday there were 24 forclosed homes in East Bellevue, i.e. those which the bank has taken title, and only four bank owned homes listed in the MLS. On the surface you would think that inventory was being held back. However what is not shown is that some of these homes have a “RIght of Redemption”. This means that after the sale the borrower has the right to buy the property back by curing the deficiency from the loan amount to what the house could potentially sell for. This can tie a property up for up to 18 months.

What I am seeing at the street level is that many of the mortgage servicers are overwhelmed and just are having a hard time handling the volume. When the Glass-Stegall act was repealed the banking industry changed from a branch manager based system to the present “call center” model where everything is handled in out of area call centers. By seeking to auotmate the system and only allowing a person with little authority to cite policy does not allow for the individual uniqueness of each human situation. Short sale approvals that should happen quickly just bog down. Even offers on lender owned homes are not processed promptly if the offering price is not within the 3% of the list price usually allowed by the call center worker. The focue becomes on the process and not results.There are not enough supervisors in the world to handle each of the unique situations. In many cases the notices are automated and the call center worker has no idea of what is going on. In one case I saw everything automated by a computer on a foreclosure and it took a series of phone calls before the institution servicing the loan realized that the loan had been served a Notice of Default and that a Trustee Sale date had been set. Even then it took about three calls and forwarding of the recorded Notice of Trustee Sale to convince the insitution the loan was scheduled for a sale. After the Notice of Default is sent then the loan is transferred to “special credits” and a whole new drill starts. These insitutions are very poorly managed, inefficient and just keep racking up losses for the loan holder. In the name of efficiency and cost they have done just the opposite by being penny wise and pound foolish.

Insitutions such as Chase and Bank of America have a huge resource in their branches. In my personal opinion they should take a lot of the decision making and put it back into the branches, even on loans that have been sold and they are servicing. The branch manage will get to know the individual situation of the borrower. local community. The branch manager also knows the local market and community much better than some call center worker, some of which are located offshore.

Until the problems of “call center” banking are addressed you will continue to have these back logs of back owned homes which seem to take forever to bring to the market.

Tags: branch manager, call center, Short Sale, Trustte Sale
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Weekly Scorecard 8-31-09

A big drop in inventory this week it came in at 267 homes. This is the first time it has broken substantially under 280. Before this number was fluctuating between 280 and 290. 10 homes came through as sold again a large number. The average sales price was $599,800 well above the usual average of around $500,000. What brought the average up was a $1,100,000 new construction sale. However the per sq. ft. price was $222. No matter what seems to happen this per sq. ft. sales number seems stuck around $220 per sq. ft. Other than the one new construction short sale there appeared to be no bank owned or distrssed inventoryin this group of closings.

The Pending number was also larger than usual at 8 homes going pending including one waterfront listed for $1,980,000. Even exclusing the waterfron the per sq. ft. price of the pendings was $259. A big jump. If you remember when the marker was tanking the pending per sq. ft. price was always lower than the average sales price of the sold homes because of the bank owned and short sale inventory continue to press the market down. The Pending home sale price became an indicator of future market directiopn. It appears that in East Bellevue as the distressed inventory keeps declining then maybe the per sq. ft. number will move up. It will be interesting to see when these pending sales close what the per sq. ft. numbers are and if this market is getting ready to get off of it $220 per sq. ft. bottom. The average list price of the Pending sales was $518,500, without the waterfront, about normal for what we have seen.

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Distressed Inventory Report 8-29-09

The overall distressed inventory just keeps getting chipped away at. Overall the number of homes is down fron 65 to 64. However the number of new foreclosed homes and notice of Trustee Sales were up with 5 new foreclosed homes and 6 new notices of Trustee Sale. This was a big jump from the weeks before but the homes this week sold quicker overall than they came back on the market. If this economy would have even a mild uptick at the consumer level then I think most of this inventory would be gone. Click on the link for the spreadsheet. East Bellevue Foreclosure Report 8-29-09

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