Foreclosure Auctions In Brooklyn Are Spiking For the First Time Since The Recession
We learned a while ago that Brooklyn has an honest-to-god “foreclosure belt,” but another unexpected piece to add to the puzzle: The Real Deal reports that for the first since the recession (and the burst of the housing bubble), rates of foreclosure auctions are on the rise pretty much everywhere other than Manhattan.
According to numbers gathered by PropertyShark, between 2012 and 2013, auctions of foreclosed houses, condos, and co-ops rose by 45 percent in Brooklyn. They went up 109 percent in the Bronx, 11 percent in Queens, and four percent in Staten Island. In Manhattan, the numbers actually dropped by 20 percent. Must mean the bottom is dropping out of Brooklyn (and most of the outer boroughs’) current real estate boom, right?
Well, not quite. As the Real Deal points out, the numbers are still lower than they were even before the housing crisis, and, as with most things, slow-moving bureaucracy is at least partly to blame.
May be due to foreclosures that’ve been backlogged since the height of the recession, and are just now coming up for auction. “There are some properties that are just coming to auction for the first time in 2013, but had been lingering for some time,” said a data analyst from PropertyShark, noting that 70 percent of last year’s scheduled auctions in the Bronx were on the properties that had been foreclosed in 2009. Worth keeping an eye on the numbers—Brooklyn still has a startling number of foreclosures that don’t get much attention—but for now, doesn’t seem like there’s an imminent crisis at hand. And if snapping up devalued properties at auction is your thing (I assume this is true for someone out there), well, today’s quite a day for you.
Follow Virginia K. Smith on Twitter @vksmith.