Greater Phoenix Short Sale Statistics

Despite the many improvements in how short sales are handled there are people who still won't touch them with a ten foot stick and the reasons for this are understandable, but sometimes unreasonable.

Yes, short sales are precarious beasts, but there are plenty of them closing each month. In the last 30 days of this report 2,113 short sales closed. That is higher then last month, last quarter and last year. 

About 21.5% of all sales are short sales: one in five homes.

More importantly there is a 56.9% success rate. That means that of all short sale properties that go off the market for some reason within a given period 57% sold.  Compare this to 72.4% for the market as a whole and the chances of an actual closing are pretty high.

[ Graph: The Cromford Report ]

39% of all active properties are short sales and 31% of pending are short sales. There are 4,169 pending properties that are short sales which is also higher then anytime before, so expect short sale sales to be up in the coming months as a total number.

Not only are sales up, but the inventory is not being replenished: that's good in this case. We want to remove short sales and bank owned homes from the market place and that's what's happening.

Don't expect short sales or bank owned homes to go away anytime soon. We probably have several more years of this to go, but these two segments will be  playing a smaller role as time passes.

What troubles me is that I have been seeing properties purchased in 2007,2007 and recently a few in 2009 that are short sales: a small number, but troubling none the less.