Has the state of the housing market gotten better or worse since the first quarter of 2009? To answer this, you have to define what you mean by the state of the housing market. If you mean sales alone, then the state of the market hasn't changed much: existing home sales are up a little from that time, while new home sales are down a bit. But assessing the inventory of defaulted, unsold homes in the market probably provides a better measure of health.
The following chart created by Laurie Goodman, a housing market expert at Amherst Securities, shows the ominous rise of shadow foreclosure inventory. It was part of a slide in a presentation she recently gave at an event last week at the American Enterprise Institute on how the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill is stifling mortgage credit. Click to enlarge:
This chart answers the question: what's happening to the homes of all those defaulted borrowers that we hear about? Many of those properties are a part of so-called shadow inventory. This is the sort of limbo between when a home's loan defaults and when the property is put on the market for purchase.
The increase shown above is staggering. The shaded area shows mortgages more than 12 months delinquent or in foreclosure (darker blue) and those seized by the bank (lighter blue). The sum has risen from just below 2 million in early 2009 to 3.35 million in April 2011. That's an increase of more than 67.5% over this period of about two years.
