Once again RealtyTrac has decided not to publish their monthly Foreclosure Market Report, though they did update the data on their site for January. Lately they are doing this more and more as they have many more interesting reports to issue and foreclosure activity is no longer the headline story that it used to be. Nevertheless, I pulled data from their site to update my Chicago foreclosure activity graph below.
The long term trend in foreclosure activity is clearly that it has bottomed with a lot of month to month fluctuations. It was actually disappointing that auction activity hit a 6 month low since this is what clears out the shadow inventory in the system (more on that later). And defaults were essentially unchanged from December. However, bank repossessions actually rose to their highest level in 11 months, which is good from the standpoint that it means banks are dealing with the backlog of troubled properties.
Chicago Shadow Inventory
At the end of the day what we are probably most interested in is Chicago’s shadow inventory – homes that are at some stage of the foreclosure process. As you can see in the graph below it had been plummeting fast for a couple of years and then leveled off. However, December had the largest drop in 20 months. Unfortunately, January went in the opposite direction with an increase of 287 units. It looks to me like we’ve never had an increase of that magnitude since I’ve been tracking the data. Hopefully, this is just noise in the data that will go away soon.
#Foreclosures #ChicagoForeclosures
Gary Lucido is the President of Lucid Realty, the Chicago area’s full service discount real estate brokerage. If you want to keep up to date on the Chicago real estate market, get an insider’s view of the seamy underbelly of the real estate industry, or you just think he’s the next Kurt Vonnegut you can Subscribe to Getting Real by Email using the form below. Please be sure to verify your email address when you receive the verification notice.