Not much. Fudrucker has hired an assistant to scour the land records and she’s produced an incredibly useful Excel spreadsheet on lis pendens: notices of suit, excluding matrimonial matters and extraneous bs: these are notices of foreclosure by lenders, and there are tons of them. What’s sad, reviewing the list, is how many of these owners rejected decent offers from our clients. They chose instead to bury their heads in the sand – a perfectly understandable, human response – but now they’re 30 -90 days away from losing everything. I see a lot of homes here that have recently taken huge price reductions, so I suppose reality is sinking in. Probably too late.
As for the bulk of the market, it’s just not going to sell. Buyers want bargains; not necessarily bottom-feeding prices, but nothing close to what most sellers are asking. The standoff will continue for at least another year, I predict (if not longer) and the only houses that will sell be either distressed properties or those owed by realistic sellers. 70% of the inventory will still be around a year from now.