Foreclosures Across the Country

As a kid, I spent the month of August with my grandparents in Sarasota, Florida. Just me and my little brother, bravely flying on Braniff Airlines (remember them?) from Denver via Dallas/Ft Worth, to Tampa. The flight attendants were still called stewardesses back then and they would fuss over us, help us find our connecting flight, and make sure we were delivered safely in the arms of our doting grandparents.

Sarasota was kid-heaven for us. Chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven, Lido Beach with its white sand, grandparents tending to our every whim.

I know that the foreclosures have been most prevalent in California, Nevada, and Florida—but I was still shocked to see Sarasota make the short list of cities with a huge ratio of foreclosures.

No doubt Florida has been hit hard: in Tampa, 1 in 20 homes are in foreclosure; in Naples, 1 in 18; Orlando 1 in 15; Miami 1 in 14; Cape Coral 1 in 12—and Sarasota, my childhood fantasyland: 1 in 21.

Closer to home, this compares to Stockton where 1 in 14 homes are in foreclosure; Vallejo, 1 in 16; and Sacramento, 1 in 19.

Las Vegas, always in the foreclosure news for a reason, tops the charts with 1 in 9 (one in NINE, imagine that) homes in foreclosure.

The average across the US: 1 in 46 homes are in foreclosure.

These statistics are based on those homes that received foreclosure filings in 2010. How do these towns compare to our local area? I ran some numbers, and here’s what I found:

• Alamo – 1 in 75
• Danville (including Diablo and Blackhawk) – 1 in 52
• San Ramon – 1 in 32

I gathered my figures differently, using actual sales of bank-owned or short sale homes since January 2010, and using the number of homes in the towns based on tax records.  But overall, the contrast should be accurate.

Based on information from the Contra Costa Association of REALTOR’S® MLS. Display of MLS data is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed accurate by the MLS.