The Washington Post writes about the snakes, rats, and mosquitoes moving on up to a new local habitat in the comfy long grass and pooled water of foreclosed yards.
And from Bloomberg today, some musings about the foreclosure market which reminds me of what we've been seeing in Prince William County:
"Karl Case, co-founder of a home-price index that bears his name, said more auctions of foreclosed properties will hasten the reduction of inventories from record levels and may lead to a faster housing recovery.
'I think we're going to see some signs of life in the next few months,' Case, an economics professor at Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio. 'The market is beginning to clear somewhat. There is some good news in this.'
Home prices in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas fell in March from a year earlier by 14.4 percent, the most on record, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller [pdf] home-price index released today. The year-on-year gauge has fallen every month since January 2007, as the U.S. housing market undergoes its worst slump in a quarter century".
3 comments:
One bit of info in the article about abandoned houses:
"Although home sales [in PWC] increased 14 percent from January through April compared with the same period last year, foreclosures in the county have gone up 211 percent in that time. There were 645 foreclosures last month in Prince William, Manassas, and Manassas Park, court records show."
Also:
"No county in the region has been hit harder by the foreclosure wave than Prince William, where there are nearly 7,000 empty houses...Given recent census estimates, that means about one in 20 houses in the county are unoccupied."
This speaks to my theory that PWC is exceptional in its inventory situation. I know the idea is that foreclosures were once active listings, but the anecdotes continue all around me that there are far more "walk-aways" around here than in other areas. Everywhere I go, friends have new stories about the house that went vacant overnight, or over the weekend, with no warning.
The MRIS website lists 738 sales for the month of April. The Post cited 645 new foreclosures. The foreclosure rate is still well more than double what it was last year in PWC.
So sale activity is up, no question (though remember that almost half of the contracts are contingency contracts), but what is the truth about inventory?
Seems to me all that is selling are the REO's & Foreclosures, at least in the areas that I "watch"
Knife catchers if you ask me...IMHO!
Who knows what the actual active inventory is - the figures are all so deceptive.
The house next to Alex Ovechkin was foreclosed. It was a bautiful house but now the grass is three feet high. Some real estate agents owned it and I guess they were trying to flip it.
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