Palm Beach County foreclosures lowest since 2006

Continuing our trend of asking for information and getting it, this one relates to the foreclosure rates for Palm Beach County. Yesterday we talked about the rate for Broward County and how happy we were that it was the lowest since 2006. We assumed that the same would hold true in the surrounding counties. Low and behold, this article appears this morning confirming those thoughts. In Palm Beach County as well as Broward the foreclosure rates are the lowest they have been since 2006. This is excellent news and it should continue as the economy strengthens. But it must be noted that in the midst of this good news is the fact that foreclosures are still historically high and that is expected to continue for some time. I think all this can largely be attributed to 3 things. One is that the most of the people who were the worst off are already out of their homes, they have passed bills to speed up the foreclosure process so they can finally get to the thousands of cases that used to linger for 2 years or more, and finally the desire on the part of banks to be more flexible with homeowners. As banks continue to strengthen it will be interesting to see if they continue to be so flexible, I don’t think they will. On the other hand they don’t want to get a back log of properties on their hands that would overwhelm them and be difficult to get off their books. For some time they have had a large shadow inventory here in Florida (and elsewhere I am sure) of properties that are technically in their possession but that they have chosen to ignore for the time being for many reasons (see above for the most important 2). As the real estate market improves it makes more sense for them to accelerate (or initiate in many of these cases) the foreclosure process and capitalize on the market shift. More evidence of the rich getting richer, but banks don’t control the economy. Just lucky to have the good timing here.

Orin Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld Realty Advisors

9858 Glades Rd., Suite 209

Boca Raton, FL 33434 Phone: 561-756-1665

Fax: 561-470-0707