Foreclosure filings fell 10 percent from January to February and sank to the lowest monthly total since December 2006 — a more than seven-year low, RealtyTrac reported. Yet more and more vacant foreclosures poison neighboring home values. As of the first quarter of 2014, a total of 152,033 U.S. properties in the foreclosure process (excluding bank-owned properties) had been vacated … Read More »

by David Hicks, co-president, HomeVestors                                                                                                   As the Foreclosure Era ends and … Read More »

  With the significant declines over past two years, the demise of distress sales as a matter pf concern has seemed a matter of a few months, until now.  Like a zombie rising from a grave, distress sales of various sorts have returned this winter and still account for one in four home sales, according to Clear Capital. February national … Read More »

Higher prices and fewer foreclosures have not put a dent in the flipping business.  In fact, last year saw 156,862 single family home flips — where a home is purchased and subsequently sold again within six months — in 2013, up 16 percent from 2012 and up 114 percent from 2011, according to RealtyTrac’s Year-End and Q4 2013 Home Flipping … Read More »

  There were 620,111 completed foreclosures across the country in 2013 compared to 820,498 in 2012, a decrease of 24 percent. For the month of December, there were 45,000 completed foreclosures, down from 52,000 in December 2012, a year-over-year decrease of 14 percent, according to CoreLogic.  Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to … Read More »

  Just to prove that they are not quite ready for the history books, sales of foreclosures and short sales increased slightly last year.  Institutions bought 7.9 percent of all homes. RealtyTrac reported that short sales and foreclosure-related sales — including both sales to third party buyers at the public foreclosure auction and sales of bank-owned properties — accounted for … Read More »

Foreclosure filings – default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions – were reported on 1,361,795 properties in 2013, down 26 percent from 2012 and down 53 percent from the peak of 2.9 million properties with foreclosure filings in 2010. The 1.4 million total properties with foreclosure filings in 2013 was the lowest annual total since 2007, when there were 1.3 million properties with foreclosure filings. Read More »

Only 46,000 completed foreclosures were reported for the entire month of November 2013, half the rate of foreclosure completions between 2000 and 2006 before the decline in the housing market in 2007 when they averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 4.7 million completed foreclosures nationwide. Read More »

Homeowners who bought at the peak of the boom in 2007 and 2008 are the last group to still owe more on their homes than they are worth, but rising prices are closing the gap quickly and it will be only a matter of months before negative equity, one of the deadliest consequences of the housing crash is a thing of the past. Read More »

Approximately 791,000 more homeowners returned to a state of positive equity during the third quarter of 2013 leaving only 6.4 million homes still underwater, according to the latest analysis by CoreLogic. The total has fallen from 7.2 million homes, or 14.7 percent of all residential properties with a mortgage, at the end of the second quarter of 2013*. The total … Read More »