Cleawater Homes Foreclosures Going Fast
I’ve been writing recently about the likelihood that there will be more foreclosures coming on the market in the next several months and that I thought it would not have a significant impact on the overall market. I’ve seen a high demand for homes and condos in the last year and the continued high level of sales and lower inventory bears that out.
However, I wanted to really see if this was true and so I did a statistical analysis of the foreclosures coming on the market during March and April and found some interesting things.
What I did was to look in the MLS and find every foreclosed residential property that came on the market in March in Pinellas County (Clearwater, St. Pete, Dunedin, Palm Harbor, the beach cities, etc.) and found that there were a total of 217 new residential foreclosure listings.
Next, I looked at how many of those were under contract or sold as of 4/21/12 and found out that there had already been 30 that had sold and another 117 that were under contract but hadn’t yet closed. That’s a total of 147 out of 217 that either had already sold or were under contract and hadn’t yet closed. So within 3 weeks of the end of the month there were over two-thirds already off the market.
Then I looked at the total number of foreclosure listings that came on the market in April up through the 21st and there were 175 – so it looks like there will likely be a higher total in April than in May.
When checking out the number of those either sold or under contract I found that as of the 21st there were none that had sold yet but that 43 were already under contract which is almost 25% that are no longer available.
This confirms what I’ve been saying about the demand and how that will most likely make sure that as new foreclosures come on the market they will sell quickly and not sit on the market which would negatively affect sales and prices.
I think we’ll have a better idea as we get closer to August but for now it does appear that the strength of the local market will continue despite increases in foreclosures coming on the market.