Real Estate Foreclosures by State
The Bear on Feb 15 2008 at 7:09 am | Filed under: Uncategorized
Want to see some really ugly numbers? RealtyTrac released its foreclosures data by both state and metropolitan area this morning. The findings, discussed in a story Forbes ran this morning called “Foreclosures Hurt Housing Market Further” are detailed below.
I put together the following chart using RealtyTrac’s state data, accessed here, so you can see what’s going on.
As I have been arguing, the black hole that the U.S. real estate market has fallen into is an asset market issue, not a GDP story. All the $600 checks in the world are not going to fix it–it has to be cured with asset market medicine. The GDP data that we use to define a recession don’t capture the pain of falling property values. It shows up on families’ balance sheets as illiquid assets and falling net worth. The bond market will come back to life only when fixed-income investors feel comfortable understanding and valuing future cash flow again. When that happens, as it always does, the property markets will stabilize too.
Meanwhile, if you are selling a house I hope you live in Vermont; if you are buying one I hope you are shopping in Nevada, like me.
Source: Dr. John Rutledge Blog
SideBear: There is also a lot of other interesting data here.
RealtyTrac, foreclosures data, GDP data
2 Responses to “Real Estate Foreclosures by State”
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I think there is a false picture here. One couple on TV in California said they were simply going to foreclose because their home value had declined, and they didn’t want to pay their loan off if the house was not worth it.
This is not a subprime problem, this is a market manipulation problem. The government has created this mess by letting these homeowners do such a thing in the first place, and by raising and lowering interest rates trying to manipulate the markets for their own political gains in the second place.
The only reason it looks as bad as it does is because Soros et al are telling their people to write off every possible bad loan as ‘sub prime’, therefore increasing the apparent effect while allowing them to write off tons of bad loans they were stuck with. I’m not convinced they didn’t manipulate the interest rates just for such a house clearing, since both the Bush and Soros camp wanted the dollar to fall. What better way to create an economic crisis, and let the Republicans take the fall for this socialist scheme.