patrick.net

Well, we've got one next door that's probably going to go for about the value of the mortgage. It's been vacant for over a year. However, we've noticed a little action over the past month as they've hauled some more things away to the junk man and finally winterized the place (several weeks before Spring!). Some of the radiators cracked from frozen pipes, so I imagine they may be doing repairs in the future before they sell. This is Wells Fargo.

Since it's pretty hard to get a good estimate of who's living rent free and who's being booted within months, it is probably pretty hard to get any empirical evidence to base this assumption on. People could easily be hiding their "shame" for much longer periods of time, while the loud mouth gets all the attention.

However, if I was overloaded with work, could only foreclose on so many homes at once due to work loads, I would cherry pick my list to ensure the easiest homes went first, to keep a good stream going. I wouldn't want to process 25 that get stuck on the market for 2 years, I would want to pick 25 that would flip rather quickly, so I could process the next 25.

So it seems reasonable, but I doubt you could easily get any evidence to support it from viewing the market. It's just far too large, and far too many unknowns. It wouldn't be illegal what they're doing, I'm just saying you couldn't back any of this up with generally viewing the market, you would need to be an insider and look at all the departments involved and how they're each handling their part of the foreclosure process.