A few words on Realtytrac's new housing and foreclosure data for this month. Interesting snippets from the press release:
- The report shows that one in every 374 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in
April, shattering records throughout the land. - Much of April's activity is at the initial stages of foreclosure, suggesting that many lenders are cracking down on delinquent loans that had been delayed by government-imposed and industry-embraced moratoria. [My note: we'll see how those fare when they hit the market later this summer.]
- The states with the highest foreclosure rates were Nevada, Florida, California, Arizona, and Idaho. Other states rounding out the top-10 list were Utah, Georgia, Illinois, Colorado and Ohio — although the foreclosure rates in Illinois, Colorado and Ohio were below the national average [emphasis mine].
Remember how all politics is local? So is all housing data. Although the foreclosure crisis has wreaked its havoc far and wide, it's worth reminding ourselves of just how local the inciting incidents actually were. The worst offenders of the housing crisis were concentrated in just seven states--seven states! Even the last three states on the top-10 list were pulling their weight in tugging down the national average.
This isn't necessarily great news or awful news, but it is instructive. I just got off the phone with the president of Clear Capital, a firm that tracks housing data for institutional investors, and he told me that smart investors are getting extremely granular in their analyses of housing data these days, going zip code by zip code and even, in extreme cases, block by block in deciding how to handle their troubled assets. If a certain development has seen pickup in the last six months, even while the county or state it's in has slumped, that development will still get attention from hungry investors in the boardrooms of Manhattan.
Whoever came up with that locavore credo--think globally, act locally--was more prescient than he/she probably knew.
