Welcome to November! New month, new stats preview. Most of the charts below are based on broad county-wide data that is available through a simple search of King County and Snohomish County public 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.
First up, total home sales as measured by the number of “Warranty Deeds” filed with King County:
The big “surge” we’ve been seeing compared to last year’s numbers is wearing off, with October coming in just 16% above 2010 (vs. 22% in September and 32% in August).
Here’s a look at Snohomish County Deeds, but keep in mind that Snohomish County files Warranty Deeds (regular sales) and Trustee Deeds (bank foreclosure repossessions) together under the category of “Deeds (except QCDS),” so this chart is not as good a measure of plain vanilla sales as the Warranty Deed only data we have in King County.
The data for Snohomish actually showed a slight increase in the YoY number from last month, but since this includes a lot more than just regular sales, we can’t draw too many conclusions from that.
Next, here’s Notices of Trustee Sale, which are an indication of the number of homes currently in the foreclosure process:
Still dropping like a rock, faster than can be believed to be any sort of natural healing of the market, in my opinion.
Here’s another measure of foreclosures for King County, 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.”
Lowest point on this chart since May 2010.
Lastly, here’s an update of the inventory charts, updated with the inventory data from the NWMLS.
Both King and Snohomish are at the lowest point they’ve been in over two years.
Stay tuned later this month a for more detailed look at each of these metrics as the “official” data is released from various sources.