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Tuesday, May 15, 2007

King County Foreclosures Keep Rising

April foreclosure stats from RealtyTrac have been released. No surprise: area foreclosures still on the rise.

More Seattle-area homeowners are facing foreclosures this month, but the region remains far below the national rate, according to new statistics released Tuesday.

The Seattle area, defined as King and Snohomish counties, had 760 foreclosure filings in April, up 16.7 percent from March, but down 2.2 percent from April 2006, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif., company that tracks foreclosure filings. The April rate of one foreclosure per 1,287 households -- better than the national rate of one for every 783 households -- ranked the region 128th out of 229 U.S. metro areas.

"Washington has really not followed into what is happening nationwide," said Marc Gaspard, administrative director of the Washington Mortgage Lenders Association. "Certainly if you look at the Puget Sound region, our housing market may have slowed a little bit, but it's still a very strong market."

King County alone had a much worse month, with foreclosures up 37 percent from a month ago and 1.7 percent from April 2006. Its rate, however, still was lower than the national rate, one foreclosure for every 1,347 households. State foreclosures were up 1.15 percent from March and 7.2 percent from a year ago, with one per 1,396 households -- good for 23rd among states.
Although the trend is up, it is true that foreclosures are only slightly up. However, even without an economic downturn (local or national) things can change quite quickly.

But don't you worry, we're special. That will never happen here. The real estate agents quoted in the paper told me so.

(Aubrey Cohen, Seattle P-I, 05.15.2007)

3 comments:

Joel said...

Here's an article about developers dumping land they bought at the top of the boom: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/business/20070513-9999-1b13develop.html

The best quote is:
Falling demand for land, at least is San Diego, runs counter to conventional wisdom that the county suffers from a chronic shortage of available home sites, which results in sky-high prices for buyers.

Later they write about a plot of downtown land that went for 57% of the asking price and the seller trying to spin the deal by comparing it to other recent sales (We're only doing as terribly as everyone else!).

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Scott said...

The commentary in the newspaper story was a little off: Seattle's ranking was described as "The April rate of one foreclosure per 1,287 households -- better than the national rate of one for every 783 households -- ranked the region 128th out of 229 U.S. metro areas." So Seattle is right in the middle of the pack. Not the worst, certainly, but not the greatest either.