The rain may have ended our summer drought but it didn't nothing for the dwindling level of homes for sale. Housing inventory was down to 9900 single-family homes for sale in September, a decrease of 39 percent from September 2010. A large portion of that is due to the robo-signing scandal that hit in October 2010 when banks halted their foreclosures; they have since resumed foreclosing but at a much slower rate.
What is deceptive about these numbers is how many homes are abandoned and bank-owned but are not for sale. The banks are not putting these homes up for sale nearly as fast as they should be in order to fuel a recovery. The empty homes are wasting away because they are unoccupied, the banks are not maintaining them and it devalues them even further. What we need is for the banks to clean up their foreclosures processes, resume speedier foreclosures and put the homes immediately on the market. Instead our inventory is artificially depressed, buyers can't find what they are looking for and therefore cannot take advantage of the record-low interest rates that are available.
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