Huge Four Day Foreclosure Auction

Yesterday was probably not the last time that an ad for this Northern California home auction will be heard on the radio - it came on twice while driving around for a total of about 20 minutes.

According to the U.S. Home Auction website, otherwise known as the Real Estate Disposition Corporation, over 500 homes in Northern California will be unloaded over a period of four days starting next week - the airwaves are likely to be full of ads promoting this event between now and then.

Note the little red arrow in the graphic above - if you download the Excel file you can come up with a bit more information on what exactly is going on.

First, there are a total of 525 homes to be auctioned. There was a home auction by this same company in San Diego a while back that had a few hundred or more - 525 sounds like a lot.

If you break down the number of foreclosed homes for sale by county, you see that Sacramento (the home of former real estate entrepreneur Casey Serin) is the leader by a mile. Sacramento has 229 homes up for auction, Alameda has 66, Contra Costa has 51, and San Joaquin has 29.

Of course, Sacramento county has a lot of people living there - almost 1.4 million according to the Census Bureau's 2006 estimate. Alameda county has 1.5 million residents and Contra Costa has just over a million, so there is something special going on there in Sacramento with more than three times the total of Alameda.

If you subtract out about 30 percent of the population that rents and figure an average household size of 2.6 (per recent census data), you get the chart below showing that almost a tenth of one percent of all "homes" are going to be auctioned off at this sale.

That probably sets some kind of a record, though, by the looks of things, that record may not last very long.