Got your attention? Well, these RealtyTrac numbers jump all over the place so I wouldn’t get too excited. They just came out with their Chicago foreclosure numbers for August and, as you can see in the graph below, August activity is considerably above last year’s numbers. That is less significant than the fact that overall 2010 appears to be above 2009 in activity (from the limited data I have)
They also released their preliminary Chicago foreclosure sales numbers for August, which show about 20% of sales being in some stage of foreclosure. However, these numbers tend to grow as they collect more data over time so I would expect the August numbers to approach 25% eventually. However, there’s an even bigger issue with their data and at some point I will probably switch to my own analysis because of it. When I looked at distressed sales in Chicago for August (either short sales or bank owned) I got close to 40%. That’s a huge discrepancy and since I know exactly where my data came from I have greater confidence in my own analysis.
