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Janesville foreclosure sales total 20%

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Tony DiNicola

Foreclosures

JANESVILLE — Over the last couple of years they’ve become a staple, stretching over two or three pages of each Wednesday’s Gazette.

They are notices of foreclosure or sheriff’s sales, and they’re the local result of a sub prime mortgage crisis and an 18-month national recession.

But Janesville is by no means a foreclosure island.

Last year, one in five of the single-family homes sold in Janesville was the result of a foreclosure, according to figures from the South Central Wisconsin Multiple Listing Service.

Technically dubbed as “real estate owned,” REO properties are those that land with a lender after an unsuccessful sale at a foreclosure auction.

In Janesville last year, bank-owned properties accounted for 132 of the 659 single-family homes sold.

Nationally, homes owned by banks or that were in some stage of foreclosure accounted for nearly 26 percent of all U.S. residential sales in 2010, according to RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosure properties.

RealtyTrac’s report also showed that the average sales price of the foreclosure properties was more than 28 percent below the average sales price of properties not in the foreclosure process.

In Wisconsin, about 14 percent of the homes sold were bank-owned homes or properties in some stage of foreclosure.

“Foreclosures continue to represent a substantial percentage of all U.S. residential sales and continue to sell at an average sales price that is significantly below the average sales price of properties not in foreclosure—the result of a bloated supply of foreclosures and weak demand from homebuyers,” James J. Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s chief executive officer, said in a news release.

“The catch-22 for 2011 is that while accelerating foreclosure sales will help clear the oversupply of distressed properties and return balance to the market in the long run, in the short term a high percentage of foreclosure sales will continue to weigh down home prices.”

When it comes to foreclosure rates, Janesville is in about the same comparative position as it is with numbers of foreclosure sales: It’s better than the nation, but worse than the state.

For February, the Janesville market had a foreclosure rate of 3.19 percent. That is better than the national rate of 3.61 percent but worse than the state rate of 2.08 percent, according to CoreLogic, a California-based provider of consumer, financial and property information.

The foreclosure rate measures the number of loans in some stage of foreclosure compared with the total number of active mortgages in a particular area. It has nothing to do with actual home sales.