Bank Foreclosures: Where We Are and Where We Are Headed

Today I took some time to listen to a podcast of Gary Keller of Keller Williams Realty interviewing Rick Sharga of RealtyTrac.  Rick was talking about bank foreclosures and the like and where we are and where we will be heading.  RealtyTrac follows distressed property throughout the United States.  Here are some bullet points of what he had to say that caught my interest;

• An all time high of 3.2 million homes will receive some sort of foreclosure notice this year, up from 2.8M last year.
• 1.2M homes will be bank repossessed this year.
• There are 5,000,000 homes seriously distressed in America right now!  That’s 5M homes in distress but not currently in foreclosure.
• We should hit the peak of our foreclosure mess sometime in early 2012.
• Doing the math, he says that in 2013 there will still be approx 1,000,000 homes distressed and in inventory that will need to be absorbed.
• There is $1,000,000,000 of vanished equity!  That should take about another 3 years to be absorbed by homeowners, taxpayers and banks.

For those real estate investors out there with cash and/or credit the time is NOW!  But you have time.  Don’t panic.  Take your time and find the right properties.