How Many East Valley Real Estate Listings are Short Sales?

by Jay Thompson on March 5, 2008

Was talking to a soon-to-be client this morning about short sales, particularly regarding the quantity of short sales in the Phoenix East Valley area.

So I waded through logging on to the MLS (past the double-password entry process designed to thwart agents from giving out their MLS login ID and passwords) and set up a custom search to extract listings based on the “Lender/Corporate Approval Required” field.

Now before we take a peek at the numbers, a few things must be noted:

1) MLS data is only as good as what is entered. I’m sure you’ve heard the term, “Garbage in, garbage out”. Trust me, there is some garbage in the MLS data. If an agent has listed a short sale and did NOT check the “Lender Approval Required” box, then there is no way for me to know if the listing is in a short sale position. Conversely, if the box WAS checked and should not have been. . . well, you get the idea.

2) It’s possible some agents selected “Lender/Corp Approval Required” instead of selecting “Lender Owned Property” when they listed “REO” (bank owned) property. Most that list REOs know which box to check, so one would ~~think~~ hope that the data is relatively clean in this regard.

3) Our current MLS, in its infinite wisdom, has not separated corporate approval from lender approval. Corporate approval? Yes, as in when a relocation company is involved is the most common cause for needing corporate approval.

Despite these limitations, what follows is a (sobering) look at the quantity of homes that are currently listed as likely short sales in the Phoenix East Valley.

Town	# Active Listings	# with Lender / Corporate Approval Required
Gilbert	2,646	1,217
Mesa	4,655	1,967
Chandler	2,483	1,076
Tempe	994	246

Adding these numbers up, there are 10,788 active listings in these major East Valley towns. (That’s all residential by the way, single-family homes, condos, mobiles, etc.)

4,506 of those are indicated as likely short sales (minus the aforementioned corporate owned homes and other data pitfalls — a relatively small percentage I ~~suspect~~ hope).

That would mean that 41.8% of the current East Valley home listings could be in a short sale situation.

Frightening, isn’t it?

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[tags]Phoenix east valley real estate short sales, ouch[/tags]

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