1st Quarter Foreclosure Data for Washoe County...

Actual home foreclosures decreased in the first quarter 2010, marking the third consecutive quarter with decreasing foreclosures in Washoe County.  Compared to 4q09, actual foreclosures decreased 30% as “only” 476 homes in the Reno-Sparks area reverted back to the banks.  The year-over-year decline was similar, with a 32% decrease in foreclosures compared to last year.  While this is certainly good news, it’s still too early to start celebrating the end of the housing crisis — other measures of distress in the area’s housing market paint a much different picture, so I think what’s really happening here is that banks are just taking longer to foreclose on homes in default. Looking at the Notices of Default (NODs) issued by lenders to homeowners who are at least 90 days late on their payments, it is clear that there is still a great deal of instability in this market, and more and more homeowners are falling behind on their mortgages.  Using default...

1st Quarter 2010 Housing Sales Data Available for ...

The Center for Regional Studies has released the 1st quarter 2010 housing sales data for Washoe County and, for the most part,  the numbers look like a repeat of the previous several months.  The good news is that, although prices are generally still falling, the rate of descent has slowed down over the last few months.  In the first quarter 2010, the median price of new and existing single-family homes sold in Washoe County was $180,000, down 14% from a year earlier.  Up until very recently, year-over-year declines of 25-30% were the norm, so this is indeed progress.  Also of note is the recent uptick in condo sales in the Reno-Sparks area.  New and existing condo sales were up 114% in the first quarter compared to last year, and up 5% from the fourth quarter 2009.  With a median sale price of just $85,000, the condo market is almost certainly bringing in buyers who would otherwise be renting a place in town at a higher rate than what the mortgage would be on one of these value-priced...

Reno’s Housing Bubble — How Far Have W...

A few years ago a client asked me what the area’s home values would be if the housing bubble had never happened — an interesting question, if only for academic reasons.  I put together this graph to show how quarterly home values in the Reno-Sparks area have performed relative to the “average” performance from 1990 to 2001 when homes appreciated 0.97% per quarter. Housing Bubble As you can see by the red line on the chart, home appreciation rates simply exploded in 2003 and grew unchecked for two solid years.  The housing mania created a buying frenzy, with people jumping into mortgages that they otherwise wouldn’t have, except for the fact that everyone wanted a piece of this unprecedented appreciation.  New home builders couldn’t build homes fast enough, with many resorting to a “lottery system” to allocate homes to potential buyers, and existing homes were selling so quickly that sellers could basically put any price on the house knowing...

Leading Housing Distress Indicators Up in March...

The latest distress indicators for the Washoe County housing market were released this week, and the news is grim.  According to Ticor Title’s March 2010 statistics on pre-foreclosure properties in Washoe County, both Notices of Default (NODs) and Notices of Trustee Sale (NTS) were up on a month-to-month and year-over-year basis.  A Notice of Default is generally recorded once a homeowner is more than 90 days late with a payment and a Notice of Sale is generally filed within 90 days of a NOD recording (but anecdotal reports reveal much longer times are possible before the bank files a NOD or NTS).  Because many homeowners are able to bring their loans current after a NOD or NTS is filed, not all of these transactions turn into a foreclosure, but as leading indicators they do help us predict where the market is headed.  Clearly, there are still a TON of distressed homeowners out there whose homes have yet to become part of the “foreclosure” statistics. March 2010 stats In...

February Unemployment Rates by County...

The Nevada Department of Employment, Training, and Rehabilitation recently released the latest unemployment rates for Nevada, and the results are shocking: Nine out of seventeen counties reported an increase in unemployment rates ranging between 0.1 and 1.3 percentage points between January & February of 2010.  Mineral posted the largest month-to-month increase. The unemployment rates for three counties remained unchanged. Five counties, including Washoe (-0.1%) reported decreases in unemployment rates, ranging between 0.1 and 0.4% (Pershing). The unadjusted rate for the state remains unchanged at 13.7%, whereas the seasonally adjusted rate increased to 13.2% from 13.0%. Unemployment remains the most serious threat to Nevada’s economy — so long as people are worried about finding or maintaining a job, they will continue to spend less (affecting taxable sales), gamble less (affecting taxable gaming revenue), and travel less (affecting both).  Because Nevada relies heavily...

February 2010 Home Foreclosure Data for Washoe Cou...

The Center for Regional Studies has just completed the reports for home foreclosures and resales for February 2010 — the reports are on the CRS website at www.centerforregionalstudies.org, or click here for direct access. Foreclosures in Washoe County dropped 13% from January to February and were down 37% from a year ago.  Could this be the start of a new trend?  It’s too early to tell, but looking at the data for notices of default (NODs) from area title companies tells me that we’re not out of the woods yet.  A notice of default is issued when a mortgage holder is more than 90 days late with a payment, and those have been trending up over the past several months.  Seen as a “leading indicator” for actual foreclosure activity, this spike in delinquent mortgages certainly does not make me confident that foreclosures aren’t going to follow the same path.  A more likely explanation for the slight decrease in foreclosures so far in 2010 could be that...