All the Real Estate News That’s Fit to RE-Print™

Welcome to our weekly edition of Real Estate Investing News This Week. Highlights this week include:

  • Home Prices Rose by 7.4%
  • Home Flipping Drops
  • Foreclosure Activity Increases 7% in August

We hope these real estate news items help you stay up-to-date with your real estate investing strategies and inspire some profitable real estate deals for you.
 

CoreLogic Reports Home Prices Rose by 7.4 Percent

HPI July 2014According to Corelogic, home prices nationwide, including distressed sales, increased 7.4 percent in July 2014 compared to July 2013. This change represents 29 months of consecutive year-over-year increases in home prices nationally.
Excluding distressed sales, home prices nationally increased 6.8 percent in July 2014 compared to July 2013.
“Home prices continued to march higher across much of the U.S. in July.  Most states are reaching price levels not seen since the boom year of 2006,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic.

Highlights as of July 2014:

  • Including distressed sales, the five states with the highest home price appreciation were:  Michigan (+11.4 percent), Maine (+10.6 percent), Nevada (+10.6 percent), Hawaii (+10.5 percent) and California (+10.5 percent).
  • Including distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change in the national HPI (from April 2006 to June 2014) was -11.9 percent. Excluding distressed transactions, the peak-to-current change in the HPI for the same period was -8.3 percent.
  • The five states with the largest peak-to-current declines, including distressed transactions, were: Nevada (-36.4 percent), Florida (-33.0 percent), Arizona (-28.9 percent), Rhode Island (-26.9 percent) and New Jersey (-20.6 percent).

 

Home Flipping Drops Below 5 Percent of All Sales

Realtytrac’s second quarter Home Flipping Report shows that nearly 31,000 single family homes were flipped nationwide in the second quarter of 2014. That represents 4.6 percent of all U.S. single family home sales, down from 5.9 in the first quarter of 2014 and down from 6.2 percent in the second quarter of 2013.
“Flipping” is where a home is purchased and subsequently sold again within 12 months.
Investors averaged a gross profit of more than $46,000 per flip on homes flipped in the second quarter of 2014, a 21 percent gross return on the initial investment. The average gross return was down from 24 percent in the first quarter and down from 31 percent a year ago, which was the peak in percentage return on flips nationwide since RealtyTrac began tracking the flipping data in the first quarter of 2011.
realtytrac home flips
 

Foreclosure Activity Increases 7 Percent in August

On Thursday, RealtyTrac released its U.S. Foreclosure Market Report™ for August 2014, which shows foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 116,913 U.S. properties in August. That is an increase of 7 percent from the previous month.
Other Findings:

  • Scheduled Foreclosure Auctions Post First Annual Increase Since November 2010
  • Foreclosure Starts Up 12 Percent From Previous Month
  • REOs Up 2 Percent

“The August foreclosure numbers demonstrate that although the foreclosure crisis is well behind us, the messy business of cleaning up the distress lingering from the housing bust continues in many markets,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.
“The annual increase in foreclosure auctions — the first since the robo-signing controversy rocked the foreclosure industry back in late 2010 — indicates mortgage servicers are finally adjusting to the new paradigms for proper foreclosure that have been implemented in many states, whether by legislation or litigation or both.”