So many foreclosed homes are for sale in Southern California that these distressed properties will soon dominate the market, forcing prices down even further.
About half the homes sold in the region in August had been repossessed, according to figures released Wednesday by the real estate tracking service MDA DataQuick, driving prices down 34% over the previous year to a median of $330,000….
“We’ll certainly see more than 50% foreclosures,” said Sean O’Toole, chief executive of ForeclosureRadar, a seller of default data.
Good news for home buyers, no?
Our banks had to learn the hard way in the 80’s that selling peoples’ homes over their heads and collapsing the market, in the same way as they had done with business lending, was not necessarily in their best interests.
Jeff,
If you can find them, and they can prove they are legit. Everyone gets excited about a prospective buyer coming into a real estate office, but their announced intention quite often only means a boatload of discovery of buyer’s liabilities that leads to a highly excessive proportion of amount of time from the agents, lenders and escrow people to the scope of the deal. It is not a happy time if you are “in the business.” In general.