One of the things that has always bugged me about the way many analyze real estate markets is the prevailing wisdom that foreclosure properties are not relevant to understanding the market…that foreclosure sales are “tainted.”
A sale coming out of foreclosure is a sale anyway you slice it. It represents competition for existing listings. If foreclosure list prices happen to be lower, they will influence non-foreclosure listing prices and time on the market for all properties. Foreclosure listings or sales are not some special transaction in a vacuum. The decision to include them should not be affected by whether the market is rising, falling or stable.
So I thought it was pretty cool to see the announcement of Trulia’s partnership with RealtyTrac and the addition of 400,000 foreclosure listings to the more than 2,000,000 listings that are currently available on Trulia.com
Coincidentally [wink], this month’s Trulia Trends Report spotlights foreclosure listings. The report is based on a continuing evolution of ideas that has come as a result of the collaboration between [Trulia](http://www.trulia.com) and my appraisal firm [Miller Samuel](https://millersamuel.com).
Trulia understands how important it is not to arbitrarily filter out content.
Disclosure: I am a member of the Trulia Industry Advisory Board so I may have been temporarily insane when I wrote this post.
2 Comments
Comments are closed.
Jonathan,
I must tell you how shocked I was to receive my Trulia Alerts this morning and have nearly two dozen lis pendens listings, here in the Hamptons. This transparency is BIG and will change the way we look at the market.
That being said, there were only 4 foreclosure sales recorded in the Hamptons (Southampton and East Hampton Townships) in all of 2006. For the first half of 2007 there have been 8 recorded foreclosures. Statistically, the foreclosure rate is up 100% in only the first 6 months, but going from 4 to 8 does not make a severe crisis in my view. We’ll see what the second half of the year brings…md
Jonathan, thanks for the update on Trulia. It’s truly shocking (no pun intended) to look at homes for sale with foreclosures included.
It’s not going to take long for this following figure to appear in a national news story, since it is sensational – it may already be out there somwhere – but here is what finally caught my attention.
Total homes for sale – Sep/Oct 07 – 4.45 million
Total foreclosures for sale Sep 07 – 1.19 million
Foreclosures, as % of all homes on market – 26%
That is a CRAZY number. That’s 1 out of every 4 homes (or 1 out of every 5 if foreclosures are not included in the homes for sale number). If that isn’t changing how people experience the real estate market, I don’t know what will.