Housing in the 2nd quarter posted relatively strong sales (up 34% from Q1 and up 12 from last year), and distressed sales (REO or short sale) accounted for about 7% less of the total than they did last quarter – all good news. Also, NODs filed in the second quarter numbered 30% fewer than in the first quarter and 27% fewer than a year ago – another good sign that perhaps the worst is behind us. However, NTSs were up 14% from a year ago, and actual bank foreclosures were up dramatically – up 33% from 1st quarter and up 84% from a year ago.
What is looks like to me is that banks started to move on some of the stockpiled properties that have been sitting on their books for the last several quarters. There is clearly a backlog of distressed homes that have not been dealt with yet, and we will likely start to see those working their way through the system in the coming months. While it’s great news that the new defaults (NODs) were down in the second quarter, it’s still distressing to see actual bank ownership increasing. At its worst, over 70% of the homes on the market were “distressed” with either a short sale listing or a bank owner…as of June 2010, that number was still at 65% (that is, 65% of all active MLS listings were distressed). Most of those listings were in the North Valleys and Spanish Springs (see attached file) – not surprising since those two areas experienced the most frenzied growth during the bubble years.
Also note that the median sale price of existing homes actually increased 2% in the second quarter to $175,000 – that marks the first such quarter-to-quarter increase in over two years. That’s not to say we’ve bottomed out – but it DOES say that we’re close.
Sales of NEW homes rebounded in the second quarter, but as we discussed earlier, it was mostly on paper because I believe that the 1q numbers were underreported by the lag in the assessor’s data…I ran across several subdivisions which posted huge sales numbers in the 2q update, only to discover (by looking at the individual sales records for each sale) that many of those sales actually occurred in the first quarter. So new home sales are plugging along at a slow pace this year and we likely won’t see more than 1,000 new home sales in 2010. That’s just a fraction of what a “normal” year would look like for the Truckee Meadows, but it looks like that’s our new-normal for the time being.
For more information on the area’s housing market, take a look at the housing data on the Center For Regional Studies’ website!
