REO & Foreclosure Blog

Orange County home sales for less than a residence’s total debt increased 33.8% in January from the year before, Southern California Multiple Listing Service figures show.

The listing service reported that 487 of January’s deals were “short sales” — or sales in which the purchase price is less than mortgage balance. That’s nearly 28% of all Orange County resales traded through the MLS.

At the same time, bank-owned foreclosed homes sold that month fell nearly two-thirds from the previous January to 293 transactions — a 62% drop.

In January 2008, nearly 800 bank-owned homes were sold, accounting for half of all homes sold through the MLS. This past January, they made up 16.8%.

The combined total for all types of “distressed sales” accounted 49.3% of all MLS deals this past January, compared to 77% a year earlier. The SoCal MLS reported that distressed sales totaled 862 in January, down 27.6% from the previous January’s total of nearly 1,200.

Here are the SoCal MLS figures for distressed sales for the past 13 months: