A little light at the end of 2010
The Tucson MLS data for December 2010 was to be pulled just after 8 am yesterday morning. A few minutes before 8 am. I pulled the stats for closed transactions. There were 925 entered into the system. This morning there are 936 in the system. For all of November 2010 as of right now there are 832 transactions in the system. Yeah, my math skills suck but I can still manage to come up with 104 more sales or a percentage over 10% better for the month of December over November.
The full report will be out in a few more days (if the past release date is any indicator). All those Pending sales that went into the system in November seemed to be contributing to the December closed transactions. Isn’t that what we would expect? Well, not necessarily. Since about 50% of these transactions are REO bank owned properties, it could take months not days to bring a transaction to close. But a recent trend (a positive trend I might add) is for banks to actually be responding in “A timely Manner”.
This past weekend we had buyers that were looking at an REO property. They really liked the home and it had just come on the market. But it was New Year’s Day and there was football to be watched. There was an offer that came in later that day and the bank would make a decision on Monday. But there was football to watch on Sunday too and besides banks don’t make decisions that fast, right? Wrong, they accepted the offer. Buyers, “What happened?” Hum . . .
Pre-qualify with us or no deal
This doesn’t mean they aren’t still pulling a bunch of “crap”. (Have you heard about banks re-keying homes they haven’t foreclosed on yet?) Many banks are now requiring buyers not just be pre-qualified for a loan, they must be pre-qualified from their bank for a loan. (Isn’t that almost a conflict of interest?) Granted many car companies want you to finance the purchase of a car they are selling, but they don’t require you to qualify for a loan from them before they will sell you the car.
Oh and here’s 18 additional pages added to the contract
Yeah, that’s another thing the banks get to make a lot of additional conditions to the legal contract. It seems the contract that all the rest of us use to buy and sell real estate in Tucson isn’t enough for the banks. If you want to buy a home from them then here’s the rest of the stuff you have to agree to before we will accept your offer to purchase.
Properties Still Under Review
Remember the ROBO signing scandal of a couple months back. Lot’s of banks pulled their listings from the market (many with offers pending) well, a lot of those are “Still under Review” We’ve had an offer waiting on a property since mid October with no word from the Bank when the property will come out of review. That said, they do seem to be finally moving some real estate off the books. Tucson needs these vacant homes to be occupied and maintained. (No the banks don’t seem to be interested in maintaining the homes they own.)
The new year is off and running. While there are signs of recovery in the economy, everyone notes that housing is the last to show signs and those signs hopefully will show brighter in 2011.
