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Even in the vacation home market around Lake Gaston, where speculators have flipped houses for years, very few have gone into foreclosure according to Sandra Shearin, owner of South Shore Realty on Lake Gaston.
Shearin said most of the problems seen in the Lake market are “short sales,” where a seller sells a house for less money than they owe on it and walk away with nothing.
In fact, according to numbers released by RealtyTrac, a private company that tracks foreclosures and sells the information over the Internet, North Carolina as a whole is in the lower third of the nation in numbers of foreclosure filings.
Most of those foreclosures are happening in just five North Carolina counties that have the largest cities, which suggest the ultra-risky loans that have wrecked the home mortgage market nationally are being made mostly in very large housing markets.
Those five counties are Mecklenburg, with 742, Wake, with 388, Guilford, with 280, Forsythe, with 209 and Durham, with just 201 foreclosure filings. North Carolina as a whole had 14,021 homeowners file for foreclosure so far in 2008. Compare that with the nation's leader California, which had 71,508 homeowners file so far this year.
All of these numbers are difficult to track and can be misleading according to Chris Matty, chief marketing officer for ForeclosurePoint.com, another Internet foreclosure tracking site.
"In many markets we are seeing where 40 to 50-percent of the foreclosures get canceled prior to the scheduled auction date," Matty said. "Furthermore, 50 to 85-percent of the original auction dates posted on these (foreclosure tracking) sites get postponed."
Just the fact that the rate of foreclosure filings has been up by more than 50 percent nationwide for each month in 2008 points to a serious problem for the home mortgage industry and the home selling industry as well. It just hasn't hit hard as hard here in the Valley.
Lisa Jackson, branch manager of First Citizens Bank in Littleton, said the current crises has had little affect in the Littleton area.
In fact, of the five counties surrounding Lake Gaston, Warren has had no foreclosure filings at all in 2008.
RealtyTrac.com numbers show Halifax County has had just seven filings, which is just one in every 3,699 housing units. Northampton has had five filings which figures to one in every 2,172 units.
The problem here, according to David Jones, of Rainbow Realty, is that houses in general are not selling, and that is a problem in all areas of the country. CNN reported Thursday that 4.5 million previously owned homes in the U.S. are just sitting on the market at this time. "People are just not buying homes right now," said Jones.
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