RealtyTrac came out with their November foreclosure activity report today and on a national basis they are forecasting a new wave of foreclosures:
Despite a seasonal slowdown similar to what we’ve seen in each of the past four years, November’s numbers suggest a new set of incoming foreclosure waves, many of which may roll into the market as REOs or short sales sometime early next year,” said James Saccacio, co-founder of RealtyTrac.
Personally, I don’t see how they come up with this forecast based upon the November numbers, which were still down 14% from November of last year. But I guess they are looking at the fact that these November foreclosure activity numbers were not down as much as previous months this year.
More interesting is the Chicago activity, shown in the graph below. For the first time this year activity has not been significantly below last year’s level. However, as I’ve pointed out before, there is some double counting in these numbers as properties receive multiple notices at different stages. However, I have finally figured out that RealtyTrac does break the numbers down by foreclosure stage for Chicago and what it shows is that scheduled foreclosure auctions hit a 6 month high in November at 1,109 – that’s way up from previous months. So we should see a bunch of bank owned properties hitting the market soon.
I’ll start to track this data and see if there is an easy way to present all this information.
