Where trustee sales are concentrated
Trustee sale volume is not spread evenly across the deed-of-trust states, or across the counties inside them. Here is the actual distribution in our corpus, and why it shapes what can honestly be published.
TrusteeSaleData ·
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 — enough to be useful to someone watching that county, not enough to warrant a published market page.
- 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 2,459 notices of trustee’s sale across 15 deed-of-trust states and 155 counties. Of those, 225 have been parsed into structured records, and 223 describe a sale that has not yet been held.
Arizona carries the most, with 1,008 notices. Inside it, Pima County alone accounts for 40 upcoming sales.
Volume concentrates, and it concentrates twice
Trustee sale volume tracks population and lending activity, so it concentrates in the same metropolitan counties that carry the mortgages. 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 155 counties we cover, 5 currently hold enough upcoming sales for a published county page.
Inventory is a rolling window, not a stock
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 fortnight. The rule is set out here.