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Sunday, November 21, 2010

Shadow Inventory

by Calculated Risk on 11/21/2010 10:10:00 PM

Tomorrow morning CoreLogic will release their Shadow Inventory report as of August 2010. For this report, CoreLogic estimates the number of 90+ day delinquencies, foreclosures and REOs not currently listed for sale. Obviously if a house is listed for sale, it is already included in the "visible supply" and cannot be counted as shadow inventory.

CoreLogic then adds this shadow or "pending inventory" to the "visible supply" for August as reported by the NAR: 4.1 million units and 12.0 months-of-supply.

The term "shadow inventory" is used in many different ways. My definition is: housing units that are not currently listed on the market, but will probably be listed soon. This includes:

  • REOs, foreclosures in process and some percentage of seriously delinquent loans. This is the number CoreLogic is estimating.

  • Unlisted new high rise condos. This also includes high rise condos that were converted to rental units with the intention of eventually selling the units. Note: these properties are not included in the new home inventory report and are not included in the CoreLogic report. These is no data for the number of units nationwide, and these have to be counted on a city by city basis (Las Vegas and Miami have many of these units).

  • Homeowners waiting for a better market. This includes the "accidental landlords" who rented their properties and who will try to sell as soon as the market improves after the current tenant's lease expires.

    I expect CoreLogic to report 1.5 to 2.0 million units of pending supply, and that will put their combined months-of-supply metric in the stratosphere. Although the CoreLogic report is useful in estimating future supply, I think it is the visible supply that impacts prices.

    Earlier: Here is the economic schedule for the coming holiday week. There will be plenty of data released early in the week, including existing home sales on Tuesday, new home sales on Wednesday, the 2nd estimate of Q3 GDP on Tuesday, and Personal income and spending for October on Wednesday - and much more.

    And a summary of last week.