by Calculated Risk on 2/27/2012 03:26:00 PM

From the FHFA: FHFA Announces Pilot REO Property Sales in Hardest-Hit Areas

The Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) today announced the first pilot transaction under the Real Estate-Owned (REO) Initiative, targeted to hardest-hit metropolitan areas — Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix and parts of Florida.

With this next step, prequalified investors will be able to submit applications to demonstrate their financial capacity, experience and specific plans for purchasing pools of Fannie Mae foreclosed properties with the requirement to rent the purchased properties for a specified number of years.

Here is an over view of the properties being offered. The offer is for 2,490 Fannie Mae properties with a total of 2,854 units (some properties are 2, 3 and 4-units).

Click on graph for larger image.

What is surprising is that most of these units are already rented (85% of the units are rented) and almost 60% of the units on term leases (the rest are month-to-month).

The original idea behind the REO-to-rental program was to sell vacant REO to investors and only in certain areas. These investors would agree to rent the properties for a certain period, and that would reduce the number of vacant units on the market (or coming on the market). This offer doesn't seem to match that goal.

Fannie already has a program to keep tenants in place if they foreclose on a rented property - and this sounds like Fannie is selling some of these tenant-in-place properties.