Charleston foreclosure report sales and analysis, September 14, 2010
Everyone loves a deal and many Charleston home buyers are doing just that by buying a foreclosure. Let's look at what has happened year to date with lender owned homes in the Charleston real estate market.
Since January 1st, 503 homes that are identified as lender owned homes have sold out of a total of 6234 total sales in the Charleston area this year. That represents approximately 8 percent of the total. There are also 84 lender owned homes that are under contract but contingent and another 34 homes that are currently pending.
But because lender owned is an optional field in a Charleston MLS listings, some listing agents don't identify their listings as a foreclosure while others might classify it as corporate owned. So we can safely assume that more than 503 lender owned homes have sold this year and I personally wouldn't be surprised if it was double that number or approximately 1000 homes.
Now, here is where it gets interesting. There are currently 9653 active listings of homes for sale in the Charleston real estate market and of that total, 269 are clearly identified as lender owned which is approximately 2.78 percent. But forgetting for the moment that as mentioned above, some listings aren't listed as lender owned, if you compare the sales with the active listings, you can clearly see that lender owned homes are selling at a much faster rate than either short sales or traditional sales by a pretty wide margin.
And another important point is simply this. You can also see that there are not thousands of foreclosures available for sale in the Charleston real estate market. There certainly are some but not as many as most people might think there are. And if you happen to spot one you like, you generally have to move pretty quickly to get it so you should have your financing in place and be ready to be pre approved immediately by the preferred lender which is required in most cases although you don't have to use that lender to obtain your mortgage. And if you are paying cash, you have to show proof of funds.
Statistics compiled by Howard Arnoff using the Charleston MLS as the source of data, information deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
For an up to date foreclosure list, visit the foreclosure page on my website.