The latest numbers From RealtyTrac
Foreclosure Stats Show the West is a Complex Market
By Robert Struckman, 1-30-08
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Here’s a cool and easy way to get a look at one facet of the real estate industry: a national map of foreclosure rates.
You’ll notice that the RealtyTrac map includes county-by-county shading, which is cool. The color shows the foreclosure rate - as in the number of foreclosed homes as a portion of the total number of homes. That means that in low population counties with relatively small numbers of homes and foreclosures, small increases can seem dramatic.
If you go to RealtyTrac’s state foreclosure rankings, you’ll see something that’s been missed by the aggregate news about the national housing market. (We all know the biggest housing markets - California and Florida - were the grossest bubbles. For the past decade and more, our national economy has been built on successive bubbles.)
You most likely already know the worst states for foreclosure rates. But what about the upper Mountain West?
Colorado is up there with the worst bubbles, No. 5 in the nation. Here’s the rest of the rundown: Idaho is 20th; Montana is 36th; Oregon is 22nd; Utah is 15th; Washington is 21st; and Wyoming is 44th.
More interesting are the actual rates of foreclosures, comparing December, 2007, to the same month a year earlier. The numbers, surprisingly, are up and down. Colorado foreclosure rates actually dropped about 3 percent, comparing December 2006 to December 2007. Idaho’s rose 4 percent. Montana’s foreclosure filing rate rose 28 percent. (Remember how figures from low population states can appear dramatic when percentages are compared? Montana had 395 foreclosure filings, total, in 2007. Colorado had more than 14,000, Florida more than 75,000.) Oregon’s filing rate went down 10 percent; Utah’s dropped 15 percent. Washington’s rate also dropped, about 18 percent. And finally, Wyoming is also down, about 29 percent.
These numbers don’t mean the housing markets with fewer foreclosures are healthier, just that the picture is a lot more complicated than aggregate data implies. Lenders in Montana, for instance, only recently began dabbling in the troublesome “creative” loan packages with variable interest rates and loans to prop up loans. The economies in some of these states are quite a bit healthier than the national economies.
The national scene will definitely influence the local. No economists I’ve talked to have any doubts about that. As for the big questions, about where the national economy will go and how it will be felt in the valleys and high plains of the interior West? Um. OK. Right. We’ll just have to wait and see.
[End of article]For the New West, the validity of the map is in question because it does not show several distinct land ownerships which are more than 50% of the New West: USFS, National Parks, USFWS, BLM, State Forests, Indian Reservations, and military reservations. Those areas are pretty blue because there is nothing there in a statistical way.
By not showing the public ownership majority counties, and not the Indian lands, the overall impact is not apparent. Most of Nevada residents are in Las Vegas and Henderson, which are very red, and the rest of the State is primarily public lands that Harry Reid has yet to grease the skids for their being sold to Las Vegas interests. In real terms, Nevada is a hot bed of bad loans and corrupt real estate banking. Who'd a thunk?
So it appears that there are few foreclosures on the Selway-Bitteroot Wilderness or the Ft. Peck or Warm Springs Rez lands. No kidding, Captain Ajax. Or those areas where the most wealthy have their second or fifth of tenth homes seem to be faring well and are painted blue. And there have been no foreclosures in Yellowstone NP. whew! That is lucky.
Not much foreclosure action in the Grain Belt, that great flat mid America farmland from Canada to Mexico east of the Rockies. You have to think that oil, gas, coal, corn, cattle and $13 a bushel wheat is good for the economy even if it is bad for the environment. The map almost has an environmental aspect to it: the more concerned about saving the environment an area is, the higher its foreclosure rate. The bluest voting areas, the greeenest voting areas, are the redest on the map. It appears that perhaps more attention to matters financial would have served those most concerned with the environment. Unless, of course, you are a trust puppy, then it makes little difference.
If you go to big screen, it all of the sudden makes sense: the worst of the problems are in states with the most electoral college votes: Florida, Ohio, California, New York, Michigan. Ah hah! There will be a solution soon in an election year.
Gee Bear,
You should be happy with a bear market. All those new friends!
Just goes to show that blue-staters are more prone to falling for fiscal voodeax.