Realtors Property Resource (RPR) – courtesy their Facebook

Realcomp, a Farmington Hills company with some eleven thousand plus members in Detroit, will now now feed RPR listings in exchange for advanced analytics for Realcomp subscibers. Realcomp II Ltd. CEO Karen S. Kage offered comment on the announcement:

“Realcomp II Ltd. is very pleased to make Realcomp MLS data available through the RPR product in order to ensure that our REALTOR® subscribers have full use of all of the technology tools and features that the product offers. Our Board of Governors approved moving forward with RPR for the benefit of its MLS Subscribers, and in line with the company’s mission to deliver first-rate data services, support, and instruction to the real estate industry.”

A subsidiary of the National Association of Realtors, RPR has MLS and commercial info exchanges reflective of NAR’s over one million members. So basically Realcomp II Ltd. has just plugged into a much more powerful network of listing and sales potential, when all is said and done. Despite criticisms RPR has not produced for the NAR revenue wise so far, it seems clear that the uptake of tech for Realtors is a slow go anyhow. Most agencies cannot even figure out Twitter let alone study advanced analytics, while it’s also clear the RPR people are tuned to SM looking at their Facebook.

Having only recently launched to support some one million Realtors nationwide, RPR is targeting monetization via their analytics. Rather than go into the specifics of RPR offerings, the video below from them explains in some detail how their historical data can fast forward agent effectiveness.

CoreLogic say underwater borrowers hold back recovery © Sergey Galushko - Fotolia.com

CoreLogic said that around 10.9 million residential properties, which amounts to 22.5% of all mortgaged homes in the US, were underwater at the end of June, a figure which was slightly down on 2010’s second quarter total of 22.7%. Even worse, another 2.4 million had equity amounting to less than 5%, something that CoreLogic labels “near-negative equity”.

Nevada leads the way with the most residential properties with negative equity, with more than 60% of its mortgaged properties now considered to be underwater. Things are not much better in Arizona, with 49% underwater, and Florida, where 45% of mortgaged properties are in the red. Michigan and California homeowners were also struggling, with 36% and 30% of mortgaged homes there currently underwater.

The data also showed that since housing sales peaked back in 2005, figures for non-distressed sales had dropped to 61% in areas with low negative equity, while in areas of high negative equity sales had fallen by a huge 83%.

CoreLogic made the following comments on the data:

“The typical seasonal changes in sales volume in high negative equity ZIP codes is very muted, which indicates that non-distressed sales are being heavily impacted by the high levels of negative equity in their neighborhood, even if sellers have equity.”

CoreLogic’s Mark Fleming added that sales and refinancing were being held back by high negative equities, and that was one of the biggest impediments to a recovery. Although some of the worst markets in the US have shown signs of improvement, the overall level of mortgage debt relative to property prices remains high.