Stream Of Bargain Hunters In Foreclosure Markets

June 25th, 2008

Filed under: Foreclosure, House Foreclosures

In May there was a stream of bargain hunters in the Inland real estate market. Foreclosures accounted for over 57% of the house sales in Riverside County and above 54% in San Bernardino County. Riverside is the only county that witnessed May-to-May increases in house sale. This is raising hopes that the end of sales decline is nearing an end.

Steve Johnson of MetroStudy, a real estate consultancy firm in Riverside compares this trend to a rousing response to the foreclosure market causing many who were in the sidelines to jump into the fray and snap up bargain deals. Lenders are offering discounts in a desperate attempt to get rid of innumerable foreclosed units that are weighing them down. In May the average price of Riverside County was $290,000 that calculated to a fall of $116,000 from what it was one year previously. In San Bernardino County the average price in May was $250,000, marking a fall of $111,500 from May 2007. DataQuick Information Systems released the figures.

The opinion of analyst Andrew LePage of DataQuick is that the Inland real estate market prices have dropped at a faster rate than the neighbouring regions. This caused an increase in house sales year-over-year in Riverside and San Bernardino counties. Buyers are once again vying with each other for a slice of the cake. There have been many offers on a single house within the price range of $300,000. To take an instance – when the price of a house in Moreno Valley was slashed down to $125,000 from $199,000 the selling agent received 18 offers within the short span of three days.

San Bernardino and Riverside were the two top rankers in Southern California as regards sale of repossessed houses. In the entire area inclusive of Orange, San Diego, Los Angeles and Ventura, repossessed sales comprised of 37% of all the existing units sold.

The new-home market however continued to flounder. It saw a year-to-year fall in numbers of sales from 11,75 to 688 units in Riverside County. In San Bernardino County the numbers fell from 503 to 369. In Riverside County 3,444 units were sold in all in May marking 4.1% increase from May of the previous year. In San Bernardino County house sales fell by 6.5% - it being the worst May since 1993. Sales of existing houses in San Bernardino increased by 3.4% as compared to the previous year.