How Foreclosure Affects Your Property Values

When determining property values, appraisers take several factors into account.  One of those factors is recent sales price of comparable houses in your neighborhood.  It used to be standard practice to exclude foreclosure sales from these "comps".  However, since the foreclosure crisis, foreclosure prices - and the downward pressure they are exerting on the marketplace - cannot be ignored.  When foreclosures were an anomaly, their statistical value could be ignored, but in the current market, they are having a real effect on the value of non-foreclosed property.  A new report from the Center for Responsible Lending has put a number on that effect.  They are estimating that the current foreclosure crises has reduced home value for non-foreclosure houses by a total of two trillion dollars.

via Housing Wire

Foreclosure and Voting

Michele Lerner at HSH.com speculates about the effect the voters displaced by the current foreclosure environment will have on the election:

In every state, voter registration is tied to residency, but states vary in how a voter must establish their residency and re-register to vote. With some 1.3 million homes in some stage of foreclosure as of August 2012 and with approximately 3.8 million foreclosures already complete since September 2008, according to the market research firm CoreLogic, foreclosures could keep hundreds of thousands of voters away from the polls this November.

Foreclosures expected to deter thousands of voters via HSH.com