Looks like the neighborhoods of my youth are having just as much trouble as we are further south. However, I can't agree with your Unsold Foreclosures Inventory numbers. For example, your number for San Bernardino of 7,806 appears to be a simple addition of January through August. That would seem to imply that if the a foreclosure didn't sell in January, it never sells. Is it not entirely possible that several of those unsold foreclosures in January sold in February, March, April, May, June, July, or August?

With that detected, I would ignore the total, and once I do that, I would think that the unsold inventory of 822 in January rolled over to February, so February's inventory increased by 305 (1,127 total for February minus the 822 that rolled over from January). When I keep doing that, it looks like inventory increased to a high of 1,317 in May but has now fallen to 900 for August.

I think you can verify that by looking at February for Riverside. It started out at 1,486 yet sold 1,590. Where did those extra 104 homes come from? I would submit that February started out with the 1,278 left over from January. Then 312 new foreclosures hit the market. All of them from January and the additional new 312 ones from February sold in February.

Of course, it's highly likely that if a foreclosure came on the marketing on February 26 that it did not close escrow by February 28. So I would think that many of the foreclosures are carrying over from month to month. Perhaps a property that closed escrow on February 28 actually opened escrow on December 1 of the preceding year, so it might still have been counted in the unsold foreclosures at the end of December and the end of January before it showed up in the closed sales for February.

Or is there something missing here?