From DSNews.com:
As home prices improve and headlines spell out recovery, those on the ground in housing markets across the country are encountering a new threat: “zombies.”
These so-called “zombie” foreclosures take place when a bank initiates foreclosure on a property but then abandons the process, leaving the property in a sort-of no-man’s land—vacant but not for sale.
According to RealtyTrac, there are about 167,000 properties nationwide that fall into this category. In addition, the company says there are hundreds of thousands of unlisted REOs and even more properties winding through lengthy judicial foreclosure procedures.
“Unlisted foreclosures and bank walkaways used to be extremely rare, but they have mushroomed recently, ballooning into a large number of homes stuck in foreclosure limbo, sometimes for years,” RealtyTrac stated in its most recent issue of Foreclosure Report News.
JtR: Click on the link above to read about some smug REO brokers.
Bank of America has 23,966 foreclosure “zombies,” the most held by any bank, according to RealtyTrac.
Wells Fargo is not far behind with 22,968, and JPMorgan Chase holds the third-highest inventory of foreclosure “zombies”-16,054 by RealtyTrac’s count.
With 55,503, Florida is home to the highest number of unoccupied “zombie” properties.
In total, RealtyTrac estimates there are about 1 million vacant homes that need to be sold but are currently out of reach for most real estate agents.
Meanwhile, real estate markets across the country are dealing with inventory shortages.
The shortages, combined with high investor activity, have caused price surges in several markets. In fact, some real estate professionals worry that investors have crowded out traditional buyers and artificially inflated property values in some areas.
“It’s not rocket science to predict what will happen next,” said Steve Hawks of Platinum Real Estate Professionals in Henderson, Nevada.
He says Las Vegas “will see another 20 percent appreciation in prices over the next nine months. Vacant homes and delinquent loans will be converted to available inventory in the second half of 2014. And the second bubble pop in less than a decade will begin.”
“Only stupid money is buying now,” Hawks said.
JtR: If prices are going up 20% over the next nine months, why stupid now???
A full 8 percent of single-family homes in the Las Vegas metro-about 40,000 properties-are vacant, according to data from the Lied Institute at the University of Las Vegas.
RealtyTrac says agents hoping to survive in today’s zombie-land must form relationships with banks, private lenders, the GSEs, and distressed borrowers to dig into the shadow inventory and zombie population in order to bring markets back to life.
Saw this at Doc’s:
http://www.redfin.com/CA/Los-Angeles/321-S-Thurston-Ave-90049/home/6828409
Check the list price, sales price, and proximity to the 405 freeway.
Jim, you think that list/sold price is bad? Check this one out:
http://www.redfin.com/CA/Berkeley/3100-Colby-St-94705/home/1276396
Everyone in the Bay Area has gone bat-shit crazy. Doc’s listing does beat on freeway proximity though.
Good golly, $905,000 OVER LIST PRICE! Cool-looking house though.
More evidence to my theory that the rich are taking over, and have no care in the world about the comps, the LP, mortgage rates, syria, the Chargers, etc.
If they want a house, they throw whatever crazy money at it to win.
I had a friend who was a sales manager at a Mercedes dealership in Newport Beach. A few years back, he had a run on his dealership. People coming in and throwing down cash for a new Merc. He said the word he kept hearing from the buyers was “google.” Apparently, many of them bought the Google IPO at $99 a couple of years earlier, and were partying with the spoils. I think the same thing is going on for those who had the liquidity to pick up 20K shares of Facebook when it was in the early twenties. Yelp is another one.
I guess the big plan of the federal reserve buying S&P futures (among other things) every day has had the effect of providing welfare for the rich, since the artificial stock market run will tend to reward speculators, who tend to be rich. So they’re purchasing homes like hillbillies who just won lotto.
Who cares about pricing when you’re using free money, and you want something now?
The Colby house was likely bought by a specialist or department head at Alta Bates hospital, a couple of blocks away. He/She wanted to walk to work and to all the trendy stuff on College Avenue. What’s 2.1MM when you are pulling down $500k as a doc? Heck, it could have been a hospital power couple.
I used to walk home from school through that neighborhood. Walked by that house occasionally. There was a nice, quiet branch library on Benvenue. Closer to Alcatraz and the Oakland line it got a little dicey. Things have probably changed since the mid-1960’s….
On that Berkeley house – the high-end east bay realtors (nice parts of Berkeley, Oakland Hills, Piedmont) practically invented the price it low, real low, to create a bidding war strategy. Started back when the market did its first up turn in the late 90’s, around 98, and they never looked back; its pretty much standard practice now. They never bothered with the whole ‘value range’ nonsense, just price it 25% or more below and sit back and count the offers. The best part is they schedule ‘offer day’ and take appointments to accept the offers and of course, someone in their office gets the last appointment. Works like a charm.