Distressed properties were 34% of Orange County homes listed for sale and 48% of the residences recently put into escrow. Steve Thomas of ReportsOnHousing.compublishes every two weeks a report on the supply of local homes for sale and the share of that inventory that’s distressed properties — foreclosures and short sales. His latest report — as of February 2 — says …

In the past two weeks, the foreclosure inventory dropped by 24 homes and now totals 546. You have to go all the way back to June 2010 to find fewer foreclosures on the market. Foreclosures will be a very hot commodity throughout 2012. The expected market time is an unbelievable 1.1 months, a deep sellers market. The short sale inventory decreased by 245 homes in the past two weeks and now totals 2,175. That’s the lowest since December 2009. The expected market time dropped to 1.6 months, also a deep sellers market.

Some of the details …

• 2,691 distressed Orange County properties were listed for sale — 34% of the 7,823 listed overall.
• 1,504 new escrows were opened to buy distressed Orange County properties in the past 30 days. That is 48% of the 3,134 new pending sales countywide.
• Thomas calculated “market time” — cross of supply and new escrows showing how long, theoretically, it would take to sell inventory. Using that “market time” math, there’s 1.79 months worth of distressed properties on the market vs. 4.07 months worth of non-distressed homes. So, distressed homes currently sell 2.3 times faster than non-distressed homes.
• 14% of the distressed listings were foreclosures being sold by banks.
• 86% of the distressed listings were short sales.
• 47% of the distressed listings were attached homes.
• 53% of the distressed listings were detached homes.
• 86 of the listed distressed homes were price above $1 million — 3% of all distressed listings.
• 2,104 of the listed distressed homes were priced $500,000 or less — 78% of all distressed listings.
• Chart summarizes trends in Thomas’ report, distressed counts and share of all listings (plus, pending sales and market time — demand divided by inventory.)

Highlights …