Time for our monthly stats preview now that May is behind us. 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 May’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 bumped up 4% from April, another smaller gain than we saw this time last year (sales rose 11% MOM in May 2009). The YOY jump decreased from 50% last month to 40% this month. I think it’s safe to say we’ll probably break 1,700 closed SFH sales in the county reported by the NWMLS this month. With the timing of the tax credit, I figure we’ve got one more month of closed sales around this level before they begin to noticeably drop off.
Here’s a long-range view of Warranty Deeds, to give you a little more context:
Next, here’s Notices of Trustee Sale, which are an indication of the number of homes currently in the foreclosure process:
Down again month to month. Barring some new legislation or other outside factor, we will almost certainly move into negative YOY territory for the next two months.
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.”
A slight dip there too. It will be interesting to see what happens over the second half of the year here. If short sales and/or “deeds in lieu” pick up steam, the number of trustee deeds will probably be lower than July-December last year.
Lastly, here’s an approximate guess at where the month-end inventory was, based on our sidebar inventory tracker (powered by Estately):
Just shy of 2009’s level. Still looks on track to break into positive YOY territory by the end of this month.
Stay tuned later this month a for more detailed look at each of these metrics as the “official” data is released from various sources.