Mike Kennedy of Railey Realty reports that about 1 in every 804 properties in Garrett County has received a foreclosure notice since August 2008 ..

for comparison here are foreclosure rates for all 50 states in January 2009. Ranking the states by foreclosure rate you see the usual suspects - Nevada, Florida, California, Arizona. Zooming in on a more local level, anecdotal evidence generally shows that foreclosures are more of an urban/suburban problem so it makes sense that North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, West Virginia, Nebraska and Vermont have the lowest state-wide foreclosure rates nationwide. These states are demographically very similar to Garrett County but have lower foreclosure rates than Garrett County so I'm not sure if Mike is just trying to make Garrett County look good in comparison to Detroit and Las Vegas or if he is trying to give an impression that there are very few distressed sellers in the Deep Creek market.

My regular readers know for a fact that his own firm has handled a number of short sales over the past six months. Maybe he could shed some more light and tell us what percentage of the sales processed by their brokerage are distressed sales (short sales, owner losing money on their investment, more than 10% below original list price, etc.) instead of dismissing their existence. Afterall, not all distressed sellers end up in foreclosure.

MAR reported that 319 property transactions occured in Garrett County in 2008 and all you need to do is search "short sale" on this blog to see that at least several percent points of that number are distressed sellers in the Deep Creek market. It's his job to make you think things are "well and improving daily" though so don't mistake a sales pitch for real analysis.

Don't forget to check back to Dan's Deep Creek Blog for future updates.