Vancouver, WA and Clark County foreclosure activity is up.

As you can see from the graph, the foreclosure activity in Clark County has risen.  I have been tracking this since the first of 2006.  At the beginning of 2006 the number of foreclosures was about 60 per month.  Then it began to creep up.  In 2007 it rose dramatically and was up nearly three fold by the end of December 2007.  Now it is at about 240 foreclosures filed per month.  That is four times what it was two years ago.

As I’ve mentioned in previous postings, the beginning of the second quarter of 2008 would reveal the state or the real state of the market.  The hope was that things would level out and perhaps get better.

On the ‘get better’ side of things, with interest rates fairly low, sales of houses are doing fairly well although available inventory is very large.  This inventory is still growing due to continuing new construction.  (What do the builders know that we don’t know??)  Looking at the graph above, foreclosure activity has leveled off since the first of the year.

On the other side of the news, although the foreclosure statistics have leveled off in the first quarter, they have leveled off at a very high rate.  At the average quarterly rate of about 242 per month there would be nearly a thousand foreclosures a year.  That is quite a lot.  There were 246 sales reported by the MLS for the month of January, and there were 238 foreclosures filed.  Ouch.  With that many houses in the “distressed sale” category, being sold by trustees through foreclosure, there is certain downward pressure on prices.  This is supported by the statistics that tell us that average marketing time has, roughly, doubled in the last two years.  The longer they sit in the market the softer the prices are likely to become.

Ralph Olsen, Appraiser

Pacific West Appraisal Services, Inc.

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