Where trustee sales are concentrated
See how trustee sale volume is distributed across deed-of-trust states and counties, based on the published notices in the TrusteeSaleData corpus.
Blog · Data
Top-heavy
A handful of states and counties carry most trustee sales. The rest hold one or two.
Key takeaways
- Trustee sale volume follows population and lending activity, and it concentrates hard: a handful of counties carry most of it.
- Most counties in our coverage hold fewer than five active notices at any moment.
- Inventory is a rolling window. A county's count moves every week as sales are held, and it can reach zero.
The distribution, as of today
We hold 40,137 notices of trustee's sale across 21 deed-of-trust states and 796 counties. Of those, 40,137 have been parsed into structured records, and 23,063 describe a sale that has not yet been held.
Volume concentrates, and it concentrates twice
Trustee sale volume concentrates twice: in the deed-of-trust states with the most mortgages, and then, within each state, in one or two counties that hold most of its upcoming sales.
Trustee sale volume tracks population and lending activity, so it concentrates in the same metropolitan counties that carry the mortgages. The national figures point the same way: 40,277 US properties had a foreclosure filing in August 2026 [1], and Nevada, a deed-of-trust state, had the second-highest rate in the country, one filing for every 1,920 housing units [2]. But it concentrates a second time: within a state, a single county frequently holds more upcoming sales than every other county combined.
The effect is that a nationwide corpus of a few thousand notices resolves into a handful of counties with real inventory and a long tail of counties holding one or two. Of the 796 counties we cover, 421 currently hold enough upcoming sales for a published county page.
Inventory is a rolling window, not a stock
Trustee sale inventory is a rolling window rather than a stock: sales enter it when a notice is published and leave it when the auction is held, so every count changes daily.
A trustee sale happens on its date and becomes history. Every count on this site is therefore a snapshot of a window that moves daily: sales enter it when a notice is published, and leave it when the auction is held. A county with eleven upcoming sales this week can have four next month without a single thing having gone wrong.
That is why we publish county pages on a threshold with a deliberate gap between promotion and demotion — a county enters at eight upcoming sales and leaves only below five. Without the gap, the same twenty counties would enter and leave our sitemap every two weeks. The rule is set out here.
The same figures, for every state and county at once and with their sample sizes, are kept current on the trustee sale statistics page — which also sets out how much notice each state's law requires before a sale.
Sources
2 primary- [1]ATTOM, August 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report — ATTOM“40,277 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings”
- [2]ATTOM, August 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report — ATTOM“Nevada (one in every 1,920 housing units)”
How to cite this article
Quote freely with a link. Where a claim rests on a statute, the source above is the authority; cite it alongside this page.
TrusteeSaleData. "Where trustee sales are concentrated." Published September 1, 2026, updated September 24, 2026. https://www.trusteesaledata.com/blog/where-trustee-sales-are-concentrated
Related
- Tracking sales without missing anyTrustee sale notices appear across hundreds of newspapers with only a two-to-four-week runway. Build a monitoring routine that catches changes before auction.
- How to read a notice of trustee's saleEvery trustee sale notice contains the same eight facts, buried in about 600 words of statutory boilerplate. Here is where each one sits and which of them can be trusted.
- The notice of default: the first public step toward a trustee's saleWhat a notice of default is, what it says, and how long each state makes it run before a trustee's sale: three months in California and Nevada, 30 days in Washington.