Salt Lake City Foreclosure Listings: Ready for Home Buyers
Properties in Salt Lake City foreclosure listings will be sold off through a big auction in the city this July, according to local real estate announcements.
Salt Lake City has been experiencing more mortgage delinquencies recently, putting more homes into foreclosure listings.
In the earlier part of the foreclosure crisis, Salt Lake City was not affected by foreclosures as sharply as Las Vegas, Stanton or cities in Florida.
But in recent months, Salt Lake City has been experiencing a wave of foreclosures. Housing analysts in the area point to high unemployment rate as the main cause of the significant rise in foreclosures in the city.
In May this year, based on a survey of foreclosure filings nationwide, Utah had a total of 2,927 filings, representing a staggering increase of more than 115 percent from filings in May 2008. Out of these filings, 796 were already in foreclosure listings while more than 1,000 were in lists of foreclosure sales.
With a foreclosure rate of one house for every 316 housing units getting a foreclosure filing, Utah has soared to the fifth place in a chart of state foreclosure rates.
While Utah was only in 13th place in 2008, it had risen to fifth in 2009.
In the first quarter of this year, Utah posted a total of 6,143 foreclosure filings, with nearly 1,800 housing units already in foreclosure listings and nearly 2,000 housing units in lists ready for foreclosure sales.
Economists and housing consultants in Utah contend that there are social factors that accelerated the growth of foreclosure listings in the later part of the foreclosure crisis.
They said that while subprime lending did not cause significant numbers of foreclosures in Utah in 2008, the steep rise in unemployment rate across the state caused a lot of families to lose their houses to foreclosure.
One reason is that most families in Utah had only one breadwinner. When the breadwinner lost his job, the source of money to pay the monthly home payment is gone. Just like in most families across the U.S., the mortgage loan is sacrificed before basic needs are sacrificed.
Among the properties sold in the July auction is a modest home originally valued at $215,000, which is now being sold at only $110,000. Another home previously listed at $139,100 is now being sold at $90,000.
With these price levels, prospective homebuyers can take advantage of low-priced homes in foreclosure listings in Salt Lake City.
