The Foreclosure Report

Nashville Foreclosures Up 60%

The Nashville Business Journal has this from Tennessee. "Foreclosure rates for May are the lowest they've been all year. But even if the numbers plateau, the Nashville area is on track to have nearly twice as many this year as in 2005."

"In the first five months of 2006, the eight-county Nashville Metropolitan Statistical Area had 2,640 foreclosures, according to RealtyTrac. For the same period last year, there were only 1,654, representing a 60 percent hike."

"Rick Sharga says typically in markets with rising foreclosure rates, there's also a slow in home sales. He says demand is dropping nationally and houses are staying on the market longer. But home sales aren't slowing in the Nashville area. Sales were up 4.2 percent in May and have steadily topped monthly results for 2005, a record year, according to the Greater Nashville Association of Realtors."

"However steep the recent rise in foreclosures has been in the Nashville area, it may only be the beginning of the wave's swell. Sharga says the market still isn't feeling the impact of higher interest rates on the mass amount of interest-only loans that were made in the past decade. 'There's a huge balloon of three-one and five-one loans coming due (nationally) in the next 18 to 24 months,' he says. 'Depending on whose numbers you believe, that's $2 or $3 trillion in loans.'"

posted by Ben Jones @ 12:17 PM