The flush on foreclosures

By BRIAN WALKER

Staff Writer

COEUR d’ALENE — Distressed properties in Kootenai County have been mostly flushed.

So, if you’re looking for such a listing to beat the rising housing costs in Kootenai County, good luck because there aren’t many.

As of Friday, there were only nine distressed properties — five short sales of residents trying to sell for less than what is owed and four bank-owned properties — available through the Coeur d’Alene Multiple Listing Service, said Tom Torgerson, with Century 21 Beutler and Associates and president of the Coeur d’Alene Association of Realtors.

Torgerson said the number is as low as he can ever remember it being.

"That number is insignificant and not impacting our market whatsoever," he said. "It’s a great thing for the people who are living here because they are not losing their homes. I also believe that it’s positive anytime you don’t have an inventory of distressed properties. It’s better for the banking system and all of us in general."

It is also in stark contrast to the way things were during the Great Recession between 2007 and 2012.

There were 82 total distressed sales (foreclosures and short sales) in Kootenai County last year, according to a recent MLS report. In 2011, the first year such statistics were included in the year-end report, the number was 866.

"There were only 1,893 total sales in 2011, which means that 45 percent of all our sales that year were distressed sales," said Janna Rankin Scharf, with Keller Williams Realty.

According to a report released on Thursday by ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of a national property database, there were 1,337 foreclosure starts in Kootenai County in 2009 at the height of the recession.

Scharf said during those tough years she had as many as 18 short-sale transactions in escrow at one time.

However, the total number of local distressed sales has declined dramatically for each of the past eight years.

"Foreclosures and short sales are down to almost nothing because property values have rebounded," Scharf said. "If a homeowner is having trouble making their mortgage payments now, they can easily sell their house and pay off their mortgage. After the crash 10 years ago, many were upside-down with their mortgage. They owed the bank more than the house was worth. Those days are long gone — hopefully forever."

The local trend on distressed sales reflects the national scene.

Foreclosure filings were reported on 676,535 U.S. properties in 2017, down 27 percent from 2016 and 76 percent from a peak of nearly 2.9 million in 2010, the ATTOM report states. The foreclosure activity dropped to a 12-year low in 2017.

According to the year-end Coeur d’Alene MLS report, the average sale price of homes on less than 2 acres in 2017 was $282,431 compared to $252,342 in 2016. The total number of home sales on less than 2 acres has increased for each of the past seven years to 4,025 in 2017.

Rich Dussell, with Windermere Coeur d’Alene Realty and past president of the Coeur d’Alene Association of Realtors, said new construction is a larger part of the market than in previous years because of the low inventory of homes for re-sale.

Further, new construction has attributed to the higher home costs due to the rising cost of materials, Dussell said.

"A lot of people believe it’s the greed of builders (driving up home costs), but material costs are going out of sight," Dussell said, adding that home prices haven’t been this high since the boom years.

Torgerson said some homeowners believe the winter isn’t a good time to sell because they believe most buyers come out in the spring, but he offered that this is actually a great time to sell.

"Trust me there are buyers right now who are looking, but we can’t find much to sell," he said. "Now is a good time to pull the trigger and put your house on the market."