With February in the rear-view mirror, let’s have a look at our monthly stats preview. Most of the charts below are based on broad county-wide data that is available through a simple search of King County Records. If you have additional stats you’d like to see in the “preview,” drop a line in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.
Here’s your preview of February’s foreclosure and home sale stats:
First up, total home sales as measured by the number of “Warranty Deeds” filed with the county:
Warranty Deeds saw a 29% increase over 2009 in February. Unfortunately, for some odd reason, Warranty Deeds in the month of February specifically seem to be a less-useful-than-usual predictor of that month’s closed SFH sales. Observe:
Virtually every year February is the most extreme outlier when comparing the number of Warranty Deeds to the number of NWMLS-reported closed SFH sales. If anyone has any probable explanations for this odd phenomenon, I’d love to hear it.
Based on the rough pattern apparent in the above chart, I would venture a wild guess that February’s 1,584 Warranty Deeds will represent somewhere in the ballpark of 1,000 closed SFH sales, which would still represent a 51% increase over last year.
Next, here’s Notices of Trustee Sale, which are an indication of the number of homes currently in the foreclosure process:
February continued the trend that began in January of year-over-year drops in Notices of Trustee Sale in King County. That said, the number of foreclosures is still in very high territory.
Here’s another measure of foreclosures, looking at Trustee Deeds, which is the type of document filed with the county when the bank actually repossesses a house through the trustee auction process. Note that there are other ways for the bank to repossess a house that result in different documents being filed, such as when a borrower “turns in the keys” and files a “Deed in Lieu of Foreclosure.”
Actual completed foreclosures posted a stronger YOY gain than in January, increasing 44% from 2009.
Lastly, here’s an approximate guess at where the month-end inventory was, based on our sidebar inventory tracker (powered by Estately):
Down 12% from last year, but still 34% above the 2000-2007 average for February.
Stay tuned later this month a for more detailed look at each of these metrics as the “official” data is released from various sources.
Your ballpark guess of 1000 is probably pretty close.
Interesting observation on the warranty deeds February issue. I’ll have to think about that one.
I wonder how many people are going the short sale route instead of going through foreclosure? I understand that the banks are now more flexible and responding quicker to short sale offers. They’ve discovered that having someone live in the home until a sale is better for them than going through the foreclosure process and leaving the home vacant for several months.
I wish there was a better way to track all distressed sales.
RE: Mark @ 2 – Lots of people are trying, but few are succeeding. Just within King County SFR there are over 1200 active short sale listings, and almost an additional 1200 pending short sale listings, but only just over 100 sales in February.
Numbers from NWMLS sources but not compiled or guaranteed by the NWMLS.
Thanks for the info Kary.
I’ve got a neighbor whose home just went on the market as a short sale. I’ve been expecting something to happen with the place for a little over a year now. They’ve tried to sell a couple of times over the past couple of years. A little over a year ago they moved out and are currently renting their home out. They have been waiting for the market to recover, thinking that this was just a temporary downturn.
They’ve finally faced up to reality, and that reality is not good as far as they are concerned. They’re probably underwater by about 25%. I’m guessing that the rent they are receiving comes about $1500 per month short of covering their expenses, give or take.
We’ll see how the short sale goes for them, if the pain gets to great I wouldn’t be surprised to see their home go into foreclosure.
By Kary L. Krismer @ 1:
Apparently you and I are the only ones that find it interesting. :^)
I’m having trouble understanding the graph, Tim. Some labels would help alot. What’s the line? Are the green dots MLS closings or warranty deeds? I’m curious about where your warranty deed stats come from too.
RE: Gilly @ 6 – Each dot represents the result of the following equation for each individual month:
( [King County Warranty Deeds] / [King County NWMLS SFH Closed Sales] ) – 1
In other words, when the dot falls at 100%, there were 100% more warranty deeds than NWMLS SFH closed sales in King County that month. The line is just the 12-month moving average.
As for where the Warranty Deed data comes from, I address that in the first paragraph of the post. I’m pulling it directly from the King County public records search.
OK, I get it. Yes, you did say about the Recorder’s Office, many apologies – I never noticed that hotlink to get total deed numbers! (Learn something new every day).
Recorder’s Office says for Jan 2010
1,374 Warranty Deeds
1,020 Quit Claim Deeds
3 Real Estate Contracts
(but QCDs and RE Contracts are unlikely to show up in MLS sales in significant numbers).
NWMLS says 1222 SFH + Condos closed sales for January.
Off the top of my head, I’d expect there to be slightly more warranty deeds than closings normally, because MLS figures exclude Farms, Vacant Land and Commercial sales, and the Warranty Deed figures must include those. Maybe there’s something seasonal in one of those categories?
Warranty Deeds are 152 higher than NWMSL closings for Jan (see above). Farms, Vacant Land & Commercial sales in Jan 2010 account for 20, leaves => 132. There must also be a few private sales and FSBOs in the Warranty Deed numbers… those FSBOs who never go near the MLS. (FSBO stats are hard to track, there aren’t that many of them these days, and most are flat-fee listings which would show up in the MLS stats. But there must be some).
Essentially, my suggestion is the fluctations are because of sales outside the normal SFH market which are included in Warranty Deed figures, rather than because of weird happenings within the SFH market.
tim,
wondering if on those graphs where you are showing month to month stats with yoy comparisons if it might be more instructive if you included yoy comparison with all of the months. in this case, you’d show 2008 numbers for mar – dec 2009, and 2009 numbers for jan/feb 2010. not sure if the software would allow you to do it easily, but for graphical purposes, it’d probably be best to have a rolling starting month. so for this month’s graph, march 2008/2009 would be the first month on the left of the x axis, and feb 2009/10 would be the last month on the right of x axis. this would give a pretty easy (more continuous) visual interpretation for what the housing market has done in the last 12 and 24 months. it seems rather arbitrary and fixed to have january always be the start of a rolling set of data. if its easy to do, i’d recommend you check it out yourself and see what you think. you could still use a single color for the current and preceding 12 months (regardless of calendar yaer), and a different single color for the prior year. a vertical break between dec and jan could add clarification.
Tracking the Warranty deeds in comparison to the MLS data is useless. Warranty deed filings can be many things other than home sales. Such as trustee property transfers (for estates, not foreclosures), legal description corrections, legal name corrections. HUD property transfers, property transfers between LLC’s and other companies. It includes a number of non sales related property transfers.
RE: JJL @ 11 – But there should be some sort of a correlation. The issue is why is February less correlated than the other months. My only thought is some sort of tax issue, but February is a strange month for that to occur.
RE: Kary L. Krismer @ 12 – A tax issue was also my first thought, but as I am a Canadian resident I am not familiar with the US system. Could this be something that is going on in the business sector? Maybe an offset of 1-2 months from an actual deadline makes sense for legal reasons …. All just speculation =)
Also note 65-105% ratio from 2000-2007 and then ratio drops steadily from 2007. Must be something in lockstep with falling property prices… maybe connected with february outliers. I just spent an hour looking at warranty deeds for first 10 days of jan 2010, then first 10 days of feb 2002, and the difference is family trusts. I didn’t count everything, but in 2010 there are only a handful of family property transfers and revocable trusts, in 2002 there were dozens .. easily spotted as similar grantor/grantee names. Maybe many were related to property investment, which decreased as the market fell. If so, amount by which february is off should decrease over time, which it seems to visually. Like Kary and @13 say, maybe there’s some tax advantage to transferring property before April 15?