Distressed Home Sales
With the foreclosure and eviction moratorium there are very few distressed homes that can be sold . Only 1.3 % of July ' s sales in 2021 were distressed and that is another record low , down from 3.3 % last year . One would think that once the moratoria are lifted , distressed sales are going to take off but that might not be the case at least for a while . One reason is that the foreclosure process is extremely long like 3 years so you won ' t see an immediate effect . But the other reason is that home prices have risen enough that homeowners in dire straits might be able to just sell their home and pay off their mortgage without any problems .
Since the housing crisis the percentage of home sales that are distressed has steadily declined to almost negligible levels .
Chicago Home Inventory
After a big Coronavirus induced spike in April 2020 the inventory of homes for sale dropped back down . Detached inventory keeps setting new record lows while attached inventory has dropped to the lower end of the historic range .
The inventory of homes for sale remains ridiculously low and I continue to do my own calculations to produce the graph shown here . The most dramatic example of course is detached homes which had only a 2.2 month supply in July , which is the same as last year nevertheless , a record low for July . But attached homes were also pretty low with only a 3.5 month supply , which is at the lower end of historic July inventory levels .
With inventory levels so low and sales so high it should be no surprise that market times have gotten ridculously fast at least for detached homes . They sold on average in only 42 days . That ' s down from 70 days last year and keep in mind that half the homes sold in 12 days or less ! Meanwhile attached homes , despite their growth spurt , are selling on average in 66 days , which is only down slightly from last year ' s 68 days .
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