Foreclosures coming home to nest

[rose-colored-coolaid]

You can tell a lot about a real estate market by listening to radio commercials. Like if is in every 3rd commercial suggesting that people should free up cash by refinancing, then it probably means a lot of people are using their home as a piggy bank.

That's why yesterday was a break through for me. I heard my first foreclosure commercial. It wasn't for distressed sellers, it was for buyers looking for cheap homes, but it was still a foreclosure commercial.

This fits with my housing distress signal: Foreclosure Commercials Per Non-Foreclosure Commercials, or FCPNC for short. It's easy to calculate. #Foreclosure Ads / #Other Ads. A value of 0 is the historic norm. Any value greater than 0 means a market is struggling. A value greater than .33 (1 out of 4 ads regard foreclosures) means a market is in a tailspin. A value greater than 1 (over half the ads are foreclosure related) means last person who leaves should turn out the lights.

Yesterday, for the first in my recollection, Seattle's FCPNC was about 0.0001.

[ayles]

I have been wondering about that commercial. Any body with half a brain could see that now is horrible time to take money out of your house.

In the commercial he says something about how the last rate cut is stimulating the market and is the time to act... Sounds like a crock of sh*t to me.

[rose-colored-coolaid]