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Foreclosures, Short Sales and Now Strategic Defaults…How Is Our Local Market Affected?

Foreclosures, short sales, and now strategic defaults, this is all the media seems to be able to report.  So what is really happening in our local housing market?  I recently had a very interesting conversation, it was a sales call from a national website (of course wanting to sell me advertising space), this sales person was explaining how the website worked, and the premise of the entire sale was that their website reports more listings and more foreclosures than other websites.  Wow, I could hardly wait to see.  So we went to the website and searched several cities: Osage Beach homes listed for sale 211 (on this website) and then we proceeded to look at Osage Beach homes listed for sale this time to include all foreclosures now we were at a total of 216 homes listed. According to this website we only had 5 foreclosures listed. We continued to look at this website at Lake Ozark, Linn Creek, Gravois Mills, Camdenton, and even Eldon.  The number of homes listed and the number of homes that were in foreclosure (on this website) was such a small percentage in each case.  (This was not the results the sales person was expecting and it was certainly not making the point for the sale.)  So then the sales person insisted we look at other areas on the website, we looked at Cape Coral, Florida (1,600+ homes listed and with foreclosures added some 3,800+ listings), Orlando, Florida (5,100+ homes listed and with foreclosures total more than 14,000+lisings), Pensacola, Florida (2,400+ homes listed and with foreclosures totaled just a little more than 13,800+listings).  While the sales persons reasoning was faulty as to the advantages of me advertising on this national website it was definitely interesting to see how we compared nationally in the foreclosure statics.  While I did not buy what they were selling, I spent some more time on the website and looked at cities all throughout the Midwest, and other parts of the USA.  There are several states and major cities that I would categorize as in crisis, but definitely not the entire USA.  The Midwest has fared well in the stabilization of homes and with much lower percentages of foreclosures.  So when you are making financial decisions you need to base those decisions on your local community and your local housing market because they do not always follow national trends.     

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