Home foreclosures in Washoe County more than doubled in January from December and rose six-fold from a year earlier, a report released Thursday shows.
While the sum amounts to a fraction of a percent of the Reno-Sparks-Incline Village region's homes, the growth in foreclosures reflects a weakened economy and housing market in general, said Brian Kaiser, an analyst at the Center for Regional Studies in Reno. And the trend follows the same path through all of 2007 that saw a 614 percent rise in foreclosures compared with 2006, Kaiser said.
"I don't believe that we will see a turnaround in the housing market until we first start seeing the foreclosure rate return to more historically normal levels," he said.
Using data from the Washoe County Assessor's Office, Kaiser's office calculated a total of 177 foreclosures of single-family homes and condominiums in Washoe in January, all but one in Reno-Sparks. That's up 113 percent from December's total of 83 and a 510 percent jump from 29 in January 2007. By comparison, there were 169 sales of new and existing homes and 57 sales of condos countywide in January.
Among foreclosed properties, there were 58 sales in January, all in Reno-Sparks, up 20 percent from December and a 480 percent increase from a year earlier, the report showed. Wayne Capurro, president of the Reno-Sparks Association of Realtors, said the rising number of foreclosures is holding back any market recovery as it adds to the inventory of homes for sale.
"It's great for buyers, but's really rough on sellers," he said.
But in the past month, Capurro said he's seen a "fairly substantial" increase in the number of pending sales of existing homes.
"If that continues to increase, we'll be able to possibly see the bottom of this thing," he said.
Comments