Foreclosures Surge – Hardtack Relation

May saw a record number of foreclosures in the US, up nearly 90% from the same month in 2006.

There were 176,137 notices of default, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions last month, led by California, Florida and Ohio, the Irvine ...

"Such strong activity in the midst of the typical spring buying season could foreshadow even higher foreclosure levels later in the year," [James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac] said in the report. That will add "to the downward pressure on home prices in many areas."

At present Hardtack is showing inventory (under track) at 1,939,682 units. To put that another way, nearly 10% of everything you see on the market is under foreclosure. Not all of those are in the MLS, some of them have already dropped off and are in the process of becoming REO (Real Estate Owned). This means we should be seeing increasing inventory again in a few month. I find it tough to imagine the overhang would be even larger soon.

Washington DC - Bucking The Trend Or Just Bucked Up?

So if you are watching Hardtack, you can't help but notice something odd in Washington DC. Specifically we suddenly had about 7,000 single family homes disappear from the MLS. This has made for a huge dip in the inventory numbers and a skew in all other statistics that depend on it. What is going on?



First of all, the chances that this is an actual sale of that many properties in a single week is near zero. Now it could happen, but chances are very very slim. It would mean a massive surge of buying north of 1,000 houses a day in the DC area. More likely causes would be:

1) Some of the inventory was never there. The MLS's had some properties that were taken off the market without selling, but stayed in the MLS until the performed a massive purge, and the inventory numbers we have now reflect the actual reality.

2) The MLS's have changed zip codes. The US Census bureau and the Postal guys are constantly adding new zip codes to better deal with statistical sampling and mail handling. A high population zip code that we were tracking may have been split in two, with a new zip code we are not tracking. This could also explain the drop.

3) Bug in Hardtack. We are pretty sure we did not introduce any bugs in the data miners, but it is possible.

In short, we see it - it worries us, we are looking into what really happened and how to fix it. It may happen to other regions as well before long. We sure hope not

Flash 9 installation on Mac OS X

In my one year of using a Mac I have never had any problems doing an installation, or doing anything for that matter. Nothing, that is, until I tried to upgrade to version 9 of Adobe's Flash player.

I finally found a workaround here.

Pending Home Sales Number - Inventory Correlation

The National Association of Realtors reported pending home resales today.

The index of signed purchase agreements, or pending home resales, fell 3.2 percent to 101.4, the lowest since February 2003, after a revised 4.5 percent decline in March, the National Association of Realtors said today in Washington.

Rising mortgage defaults are putting more houses back on the market and prompting banks to tighten lending standards, making home purchases less affordable. Federal Reserve policy makers are forecasting that the glut of unsold homes will probably prolong the housing slump, already the deepest in a decade and a half.

``We've still got a very big overhang of home inventory,'' said Nigel Gault, chief U.S. economist at Global Insight Inc. in Lexington, Massachusetts. ``A housing recovery won't happen this year.''

This helps to account for the large and growing inventory numbers Hardtack is showing, as of June 1st we are up to:

Single Family: 1,928,568
Multi Family: 125,144
Condo: 525,762
Land: 513,773