Deals to Buy Homes Fall Apart, Particularly in California

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Published
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Deals to Buy Homes Fall Apart, Particularly in California

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[cnxvideo id=”655416″ placement=”ros”]People who make offers on homes have started to find that appraisals well above these offers have triggered a large number of busted deals. California, home to some of the nation’s most expensive home markets, leads in cities with these broken deals. Another reason for these problems is appraisals that show major problems with red flags.

According to Trulia:

Nationally, sales have been failing at an increasing rate, rising to 4.3% in Q4 2016 from 1.4% of all listed properties during Q4 2014. On an annual basis, the failure rate has nearly doubled to 3.9% in 2016, up from 2.1% in 2015.

Also:

Of all listings in the largest 100 metros, 7.1% of starter home listings failed in the most recent quarter, compared with 6.7% of trade-up homes and 3.8% of premium homes. For all of 2016, the failure rate was 6.3% for both starter and trade-up homes and 3.6% for premium homes.

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And:

Of the top 10 metros that have had the highest proportion of failed sales during the past 2 years, eight of them are in the West and three of those are in California. The two that are not in the West are Atlanta and Chicago with a quarterly average of 7.2% and 6.5%, respectively, of all unique listings reverting back to a for sale status. In comparison, looking only at the most recent quarter, seven of the top 10 metros are in the West, but four of those are in California. Charleston, S.C., has moved up to second among the top 100 metros from 88th with 11.9% of sales failing, up from 1% in Q4 2014 to second.

The failure rate is 11.6% in Ventura, California; 10.8% in Tucson, Arizona; 10.5% in Atlanta, Georgia; 10.4% in Fort Worth, Texas; 10.3% in Los Angeles, California; 10.3% in Charleston, South Carolina; 9.7% in San Jose, California; 9.6% in Orange County, California; 9.3% in Portland, Oregon; and 9.3% in Akron, Ohio, which has some of the lowest home prices in the country.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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