What the Housing Market will be like in 2010

For a number of reasons, banks have not been aggressively taking title to homes and selling them, which has resulted in very few distressed sales in comparison to the actual level of distress in the market. This delay in bank-owned home (REO) sales, along with historically low mortgage rates and an $8,000 tax credit, has helped to stabilize the housing market -- temporarily.

    * 13.54 percent of the 44.7 million mortgages tracked by the Mortgage Bankers Association are delinquent.

    * 7.57 million homeowners are delinquent, applying the same percentage to the 11.2 million mortgages not tracked by the MBA (55.9 million total mortgages in the U.S.). That means that 10 percent of all homeowners in the country are delinquent.

    * Based on historical trend analysis by Amherst Securities, 6.94 million homes that are already delinquent will be liquidated, which is more than a one-year supply of distressed sales poised to hit the market sometime in 2010 and 2011. During first-quarter 2005 that figure was     only 1.27 million.

    * Defaults continue to grow at the rate of approximately 300,000 per month, assuring that the number of distressed sales will grow and will continue through 2012.

Read more here:
http://www.inman.com/opinion/guest-perspective/2009/10/8/real-estates-october-report-card