Nov

How Many Foreclosures & Short Sales in Southwest Florida?

What if We’re Not Going to Hell in a Hand Basket?

On the heals of my column about how many mortgages are actually being given to buyers of Southwest Florida real estate. This is across the board: Bonita Springs, Estero, Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach, Lehigh, Cape Coral, North Fort Myers.

I thought I’d toss around a few numbers for that same one month time period to see how many foreclosures and short sales were included in that bundle of sold parcels of real estate. First, we’re only talking about real estate with structures on it; single family homes, condos, manufactured homes. This report doesn’t including vacant land or multifamily, rental based properties.

So here’s the skinny. Since the first report was complete a few more sales have been recorded for that timeframe. 507 closed sales are now recorded. Of the 507 closed sales there were 44 properties that were short sale transactions and 76 properties were foreclosures.

Putting that in percentages:

15% of the closings were on foreclosed, bank owned, REO or corporate owned real estate.

About 8.5% of the properties that closed were short sales.

Out of my own curiosity I decided to find out what the ratio of listings that are active on the real estate market are short sale properties and also, how many of those properties are foreclosures. Why? Well it struck me that if 8.5% of the closed sales are short sales, is the listing of short sales commensurate?

Before you read the next couple of paragraphs guess for yourself. Across Southwest Florida: Bonita Springs, Estero, Fort Myers, Fort Myers Beach, Lehigh, Cape Coral, North Fort Myers, what percentage of listings that are foreclosures do you think we have? What percentage of listings that are short sales do we have? Write it down, don’t cheat.

It turns out that for the time period of 10/24/2008 to 11/24/2008 about 13% of our real estate listings are short sales and only 2% of our real estate listings are foreclosure.

This is one more reason why finding out about your local real estate market and not listening to national news is important. Only 2% of our real estate listings are foreclosures. You’d think Rome was burning if you fell for some of that national real estate reports.