Home Foreclosures: at year-end, over a million bank-owned homes in the market

RealtyTrac quarterly report on “foreclosure activity,” shows some pretty nasty numbers nationwide, as expected, with activity up 23 percent quarter to quarter and 112 percent year over year.

What is surprising is when you break down the sub-categories, you see that the number of bank-owned properties is rising faster than ever before. “Typically you’ll see about 20 percent of the foreclosure filings being bank-owned,” RealtyTrac’s Rick Sharga told in an interview this morning. “We’re getting to a point now where it’s well over 1/3 and aiming at 40 percent, so that just suggests that a lot of these homes can’t even be sold to investors at auctions” Why? Because there’s just no equity in the properties.

Some estimates that by the end of this year there will be over a million bank-owned homes in the market. That's a million of about four million properties listed on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), so a quarter of the homes would be bank-owned. Last week a casual survey found that 18 percent of the homes on the MLS are foreclosed homes.

It is very interesting, with all the programs supposedly helping owners in default and all the banks claiming that they are doing what they can to help them, a growing number of homes are still going back to the bank.