Once again it looks like RealtyTrac has bigger fish to fry than put out their normal, monthly Foreclosure Market Report. I suspect that the monthly story is getting rather repetitious for them also but it is worthwhile keeping an eye on this part of the real estate market and since they still updated their data on Chicago foreclosure activity I’m taking this opportunity to pass it along.
With foreclosures it’s never as simple as less activity is better because ultimately the foreclosures have to be dealt with one way or the other and dealing with the problem requires “activity”. And that’s the problem with the story for November. I don’t know if you can tell from the graph below but activity really plunged from a pretty high level in October to one of the lowest levels since I’ve been tracking this. In fact, only 3 prior months were lower.
However, the one clearly good part of this story is that defaults hit a new low, which means that the feeder into the foreclosure pipeline is drying up.
Chicago Shadow Inventory
What we really want to focus on is the number of properties in the pipeline – or the shadow inventory. But as you can see from the graph below this has really flattened out in the last year. Nevertheless, we did see another drop in November of about 302 properties, which equates to about a 2.3% decline, and this is probably a result of the spike in auctions that occurred in October. Not bad but it sure doesn’t look like we’re going to be going below 10,000 any time 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.