Colorado Foreclosures
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008A recent article in the Denver Business Journal stated that foreclosures in Colorado are up 40% in 2007 when compared to 2006. There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics so I immediatly checked to see the numbers from which those statistics were computed. In 2006 there were 28,509 filings while in 2007 there were 39,915. Having looked at the supply side I wanted to look at the demand side: a total of 25,320 homes in foreclosure were sold in 2007 compared with 11,395 sold in 2006. Subtracting those two numbers from the total foreclosures for the past two years and you get somewhere around 31,709 foreclosed homes still either on the market or sitting in a bank inventory somewhere unsold. The numbers for the Denver metro area in January 2008 showed a total of 24,489 homes and condos on the market and not all of them are foreclosures.
All of the news in not bad; however, nine Colorado counties had foreclosures fall last year - those counties are experiencing an increase in oil shale development and mineral extraction activity. Another half full observation, whereas two years ago Colorado had one of the worst, if not the worst, foreclosure rates in the country it has now been surpassed by other states such as Nevada, California, and Florida. This may mean that our foreclosures have stabilized relative to the rest of the country and that the worst may be behind us. That remains to be seen.
One word of advice for those of you who are thinking about selling your home in the near future. Please consult a real estate professional when it comes to determining a price for your home. There are several public databases out there that preport to allow you to determine value. My observation of them is that they are not the best source of data on home sales. To get the correct data you need to know what homes have sold for and what other concessions were made by the seller to make the sale happen. The Multiple Listing Service is the only place that you can get that information. Why is that important? In this market homes that are overprices SIT ON THE MARKET, as in DO NOT SELL. Right priced homes sell and sell in a reasonable amount of time.