Foreclosures in the Phoenix metro area (Maricopa County) are spiking:
"Investors, particularly individuals with multiple properties, are driving up the foreclosure numbers," said Tom Ruff, a principal with the Information Market, a Phoenix-based data research firm that compiled the residential foreclosure records.
Ruff added that foreclosures in the Phoenix metro area haven’t likely peaked yet, either.
Through May, 8,597 notices of trustee sales for homes, the precursor to a foreclosure, were filed in Maricopa County _ putting metro Phoenix on pace to top 18,000 this year.Already this year, actual foreclosures are more than double what they were for all of last year.
To put that in perspective, here’s the graph of the average number of notice of trustee sales (NOTs) per month in the Maricopa County: [Note: The monthly average was used rather than the total year’s figure in order to enable us to compare 2007 to previous years.]
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