Comments on: Phantom Inventories can be Deceiving (Simi Valley housing report)

By: Ted Mackel

Ted Mackel — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:39:19 +0000

Patrick,

Thanks for stopping by and commenting. I am beginning to realize that it is more that the Asset Managers are salaried employees with as many as 80 or more properties each. They are overloaded and some can handle the strain better than others. What exacerbates the situation is that many times they unknowingly hire incompetent agents.

I have been a proponent that REO listing agents should have heavy property management skills.

By: Patrick Schutte

Patrick Schutte — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:21:27 +0000

It may not be “phantom inventory,” but there are certainly a lot of REOs that sit idle for many months before listing. I personally think it’s a mixture of incompetance and manipulation.

Thanks for posting! PS

By: Ted Mackel

Ted Mackel — Mon, 04 May 2009 19:41:54 +0000

I left a reply to Bridget on her blog post. You can read it there by clicking through the pingback link.

By: Bridget Magnus » Another Hole in the “Phantom Inventory” Theory

Bridget Magnus » Another Hole in the “Phantom Inventory” Theory — Mon, 04 May 2009 17:26:06 +0000

[...] are a lot of innocent reasons that a bank may delay listing a home for several weeks or months: clearing the title so they can legally sell it; [...]

By: Ted Mackel

Ted Mackel — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:56:56 +0000

Random,

It’s hard to tell. I know that the Asset Managers have a huge load. Even if they they were holding back to control volume, the better REOs are going out quickly with multiple offers.

By: Random Dude

Random Dude — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:53:08 +0000

S.B. 1137 really slowed down things down for a bit. Now with this loan mod smoke & mirrors playing along all it is doing is stringing along the inevitable.

It kind of looks like to me the servicers are keeping about a months worth of inventory on the market at any one time. It really wouldn’t help them that much to put more on the market since they are competing with themselves. But it could be that their support infrastructure only can handle so much load and that equates to about a months supply locally. There are a lot of vacant short sales out there as well, which seems to be the bank not wanting to add another REO to the pile but the borrower wanting nothing to do with the home anymore.