Foreclosure (photo by Jeff Turner)
DALLAS — More than three dozen homes with a $1 million or greater price tag in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have been subject to a foreclosure notice this year alone.
The first half of 2010 has seen close to 9,000 homes being foreclosed. The average debt on the houses was around $135,000. Now a growing number of high-end homes are also going under the hammer.
“It started out with mostly the blue-collar workers getting whacked, but slowly and surely the number of foreclosures has crept up over the last three years and finally reached the high-end homes,” said George Roddy, president of Foreclosure Listing Service based in Addison.
When the figures are broadened out to the counties of Dallas, Tarrant, Collin, Denton and Rockwall, the number of high-end, $1 million plus, homes subject to foreclosure rises to over 130 in total.
“It goes to show there is nobody who is exempt from this economic downturn,” Roddy said. “These expensive properties are taking a hit now.”
Research firm CoreLogic Inc. found in a recent study that 1 in 7 homeowners whose loans exceed $1 million are a minimum of three months in arrears of payments.
It has become a good time for buyers seeking a bargain as high-priced homes are sometimes selling for less than half their worth. However, for the hard-pressed, cash-strapped homeowner, foreclosure can often be the only sad option, and increasingly that is meaning the very rich too.
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