Loudoun County Short Sales and Foreclosures Breakdown

On Saturday I gave a presentation on the state of the real estate market at the Dulles Home Fair.  I am going to publish those charts here and include commentary on the ones that are the most interesting.  The first charts are the complete sales, pending sales and active listings in Loudoun County since May 1st broken down by type of listing - short sale, foreclosure or organic.

The first chart shows the listings that have come on the market since 5/1 and the breakdown by type.  The slowdown in foreclosure activity is obvious with only 13% of the listings.  This is signficantly less than the 40% we were seeing before the foreclosure moratorium.

The pending sales data shows that current contract activity has been moving from the foreclosure market to the short sale market.  This is also a function of the moratorium on short sales.  54% of all contracts are written on distressed properties.

And the final chart are the settled transactions since 5/1.  This shows two important trends.  First, that 23% of the solds are short sales.  Just 9 months ago this number was closer to 5%.  

The moratorium on foreclosures allowed the banks to assign more resources to their short sale departments, thereby allowing a better success rate for those sellers that had to go the short sale route.  

The second trend is the difference in the total amount of sales versus the number of contracts being written.  There are 40% less homes that actual settle versus contract written.  This is a much bigger number than we have seen the last 10+ years.  The length of time to settlement has been significantly increased by the short sale transactions and it is showing up in pending settlement backlogs.  

As of today 1321 homes are under contract but have yet to settle.  To give you some perspective, there are only 1113 homes for sale in all of Loudoun County.