What percentage of today's home sales in the Tampa Bay area are distressed sales? By distressed, we mean properties owned by the bank or being sold for less than mortgage value by delinquent homeowners.
You might be surprised by September's numbers: About a third of Hillsborough County's home sales are either bank sales or short sales. In Pinellas it's 22 percent, in Pasco 29 percent.
Realtors didn't start fully classifying properties as distressed until this summer, when the tug of the foreclosure-heavy real estate market became too strong to ignore.
How terrible is the tug? According to Tampa real estate consultant Home Encounter, banked-owned properties in September sold for only 62 percent of what nondistressed properties sold for.
Short sales — selling homes for less than their outstanding mortgages — collected higher prices. But they still earned less than properties sold through normal channels.
Distressed sales help explain the duration of the housing slump. More than 600 such properties were sold in the bay area in September alone. It helps explain why a typical house that fetched $215,000 a year ago now goes for about $170,000.
Distressed sales might also help us project a housing recovery. In Pasco County, based on September sales, the price difference between short sales and normal sales was narrow. That suggests Pasco's prices can't fall much more.
The gap was wider in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. In Pinellas, short sales earned 87 percent of the price of regular sales. In Hillsborough, it was 84 percent. That indicates homeowners haven't felt the full drag from distressed properties.
Don't think the market's about to surge. Home Encounter predicts prices will crawl along the floor for a while before struggling upward in 2010 or 2011.
But it's never too soon to scan the horizon for fairer skies.
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