Real pulse of the economy? Check real estate foreclosures

24 Jan Real pulse of the economy? Check real estate foreclosures

After the positive speeches at the Executive Club of Chicago’s annual forecast for this year, I thought it would be a good idea to go back and look at the foreclosures on houses. You would think that by now the traction of the economy would grip and people would start to be more financially secure, but it does not look that way.
Even though some tech stocks are moving up, the tech sector is still spotty with stocks like Motorola sliding down. They also recently announced a sizable layoff.
Are layoffs and foreclosures tied together? Some think they are. Others think that some people bit off more mortgage than they could handle, especially with adjustable rate mortgages.
The results of looking at the same communities are in the table below. From December, you can see there is definitely a steady rise in foreclosures, and various publications have cited that foreclosures were up dramatically in 2006.
Great economy forecasted
Hearing the economists talk, you would think that we are all poised to go into a great year and hopefully that’s true. Some people say that the tech sector is picking up and that upgrading data centers will be a huge initiative because companies have to address Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA requirements for protecting their information and databases.
To be blunt, there are many organizations that have not gotten out of their spending paralysis in technology after 9/11, but now they must address rebuilding an aging tech infrastructure within their enterprise.
With the recent announcements at Motorola and ABN AMRO about job cuts, I do not think that local foreclosures will be subsiding any time soon. To me, it seems like there are pockets of both good and bad economies within the overall economy, so the future is dependent on where you’re at within the job market.
Reality in foreclosures
From a recent edition of the Small Business Times, the headline read, “Foreclosures skyrocketed in 2006” in the Midwest:
Milwaukee County’s foreclosures increased 51.5 percent to 4,886 in 2006, from 3,225 in 2005. Waukesha County’s foreclosures increased 48.8 percent to 558 in 2006, from 375 in 2005; Racine County’s foreclosures grew 21 percent to 288, from 238. Foreclosures ripped across the nation’s heartland in 2006 in the wake of manufacturing layoffs… The Midwest had 204,656 foreclosure filings in 2006, up more than 70 percent from 120,298 filings in 2005. The Midwest region includes Indiana, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Illinois.
According to RealtyTrac, the current Chicago area looks like this.

Foreclosures from REALTYTRAC – Compiled by James Carlini
The general trend based on the increases on the table is that most housing markets have some opportunities for people to buy realty at under-market values as foreclosures keep creeping up.
Wait-and-see approach
Foreclosures in Illinois, Wisconsin, and the entire Midwest look like they are still rising, and I am not predicting where they will crest. I will leave that up to the experts. Right now, I will just observe what happens in the next six months and may take another look at realtytrac.com later in the year.
CARLINI-ISM: One man’s foreclosure is another man’s deal of the day.
Copyright 2007 – James Carlini
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