(Save the Date: RealShare Orange County comes to the Hyatt Regency, Irvine, August 16.)
IRVINE, CA-Foreclosure-related sales have picked up, particularly pre-foreclosure sales. So says Brandon Moore, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac. “Pre-foreclosure sales hit a three-year high in the first quarter even as the average pre-foreclosure sales price dropped to a record low for our report,” he says.
According to Moore, lenders are approving more aggressively priced short sales, which in turn is resulting in more successful short sale transactions. Meanwhile, he says, “the average price of a bank-owned home is stabilizing and even increasing in some areas where a slowdown in REO activity over the past year has resulted in a restricted supply of REO homes available.” Still, he says, REO sales did increase on a quarterly basis in 21 states, “indicating that lenders are still working through a bottleneck of unsold REO inventory in many areas.”
The firm’s recent foreclosure sales report further details Moore’s comments, pointing out that sales of homes that were in some stage of foreclosure or bank owned accounted for 26% of all US residential sales during the first quarter—up from 22% of all sales in the fourth quarter and up from 25% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011. And according to the firm, third parties purchased a total of 233,299 residential properties in some stage of pre-foreclosure—defaults and scheduled foreclosure auctions—or bank-owned during the first quarter, an increase of 8% from the previous quarter and virtually unchanged from the first quarter of 2011.
First quarter pre-foreclosure sales were at their highest quarterly level since the first quarter of 2009 and pre-foreclosure sales accounted for 12% of all sales during the first quarter, up from 10% of all sales in the previous quarter and 9% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011, says the RealtyTrac report.
Third parties purchased a total of 123,778 bank-owned homes in the first quarter, up 2% from the previous quarter but down 15% from the first quarter of 2011, says the RealtyTrac report. REO sales accounted for 14% of all sales in the first quarter, up from 13% of all sales in the previous quarter but down from 15% of all sales in the first quarter of 2011. The report also points out that the average sales price of a bank-owned home in the first quarter was 33% below the average sales price of a non-foreclosure home, down from a 34% discount in the fourth quarter and a 37% discount in the first quarter of 2011.
The latest MarketPulse report from CoreLogic says the Home Price Index, including distressed sales posted two consecutive months of year-over-year increases in April 2012, the first such increase since the summer of 2010 when the housing market was benefitting from tax credits. According to chief economist Mark Fleming and senior economist Sam Khater, who authored the report, “While Arizona had one of the largest declines in the HPI since the peak (falling 47% from June 2006), that state had the highest year-over-year appreciation in house prices, posting a 9% increase in April.”
According to CoreLogic, listing information suggests price appreciation will last in the short term. “The asking price of new listings, a leading indicator of HPI, showed strong month-over-month increases through March,” according to the report. “In addition, the price of sold listings shows both year-over-year and month-over-month increases since February 2012.”
See the related graphs below for further information:
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