Shelby County Foreclosure Report — Q1 2026
Shelby County Foreclosure Report — Q1 2026
Nearly four Shelby County homes a day entered foreclosure in the first quarter of 2026. And when foreclosed homes reached the auction block, investors bought 44 percent of them — individual buyers took home fewer than one in nine.
| 341 new filings |
3.8/day weekends included |
44% of auctioned homes bought by investors |
$107,050 median auction price (a five-quarter low) |
Findings
1. Nearly four homes a day — the filings haven’t let up
Shelby County recorded 341 new foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2026 — about 3.8 every day, weekends included. (Each filing is an “Appointment of Substitute Trustee,” the legal first step of a Tennessee foreclosure, typically arriving after months of missed payments.) That is 4.9% more than the same quarter last year and slightly above the prior quarter. The pace is not a spike — quarterly filings have run between 271 and 346 since the start of 2025 — but it has not eased either: 2025 closed with 1,278 filings and 573 completed foreclosure sales, and 2026 has opened at the high end of that range.
A filing is also not a lost home: many of these loans are reinstated, modified, or paid off before any auction happens, which is why completed sales run far below filings in every quarter.
Facing foreclosure yourself? Free HUD-approved counseling: Homeowner’s HOPE Hotline, 888-995-4673. A filing does not mean the home is already lost.
2. When the homes sold, investors out-bought individual buyers four to one
140 foreclosure auctions closed with a recorded deed in Q1 2026 — up 17.6% from an unusually quiet Q1 2025, though within last year’s quarterly range. Who walked away with those homes is the story: 61 of the 140 (44%) went to investment entities — LLCs, partnerships, and trusts — 60 (43%) went back to the foreclosing lender or a government-backed holder, and just 15 — fewer than one in nine — were bought by an individual person (4 records were ambiguous).
Several buyers came back repeatedly: one investment group, WZ Capital GP, picked up five foreclosed homes in the quarter, and three other entities — Butler Properties LLC, MHV1 LLC, and Stori Grant Property Collection LLC — bought four each. Even the Tennessee Housing Development Agency, the state’s mortgage lender, took back three homes from its own loan portfolio.
Nor is this quarter unusual. Applying the same classification to every quarter in this report’s window, investment entities bought 43–52% of auctioned homes each quarter, and individual buyers never took more than 12%:
| Quarter | Auction sales | Investment entities | Lender / government | Individuals | Ambiguous |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 Q1 | 119 | 53 (45%) | 48 | 11 | 7 |
| 2025 Q2 | 171 | 75 (44%) | 70 | 20 | 6 |
| 2025 Q3 | 148 | 77 (52%) | 56 | 10 | 5 |
| 2025 Q4 | 135 | 58 (43%) | 62 | 9 | 6 |
| 2026 Q1 | 140 | 61 (44%) | 60 | 15 | 4 |
3. Foreclosed homes sold for roughly half the price of a typical Memphis sale
The median completed foreclosure sale in Q1 2026 was $107,050, across the 120 of 140 deeds that recorded a sale amount — in a market where the typical Memphis home sells for roughly $200,000 (Redfin reported a $210,000 median sale price for March 2026; Houzeo about $200,000 this spring). That auction median fell about 13% from a year earlier ($123,000) and came in below every quarter of 2025. The records alone can’t say whether auction prices themselves are sliding or whether cheaper houses are the ones reaching auction — and that roughly $93,000 gap is partly condition and location, not all discount. But some of it is discount, and it is part of what draws the investor buying in Finding 2.
4. The weight falls on Frayser, South Memphis, and Whitehaven — but the suburbs aren’t exempt
Among the 179 new filings whose property address could be mapped (see methodology), ZIP 38127 — Frayser — carried the heaviest load with 14, followed by South Memphis’s 38106 (13) and Whitehaven’s 38116 (12). On the auction side, 38109 in Southwest Memphis saw more foreclosure sales close than any other ZIP: 14 of the 134 mappable sales. The pattern isn’t purely an urban one — Arlington/Lakeland (38002), Cordova (38016), and Collierville (38017) all placed in the top ten for new filings. Two honest cautions: not every record carries an address, so this ranking is indicative rather than a complete census, and these are raw counts, not rates — bigger ZIPs have more homes to lose.
5. Why a foreclosure cluster is more than a real-estate statistic
This report measures filings and sales, not what follows them — but national research has measured what follows. A study of geocoded foreclosure and crime data published in the Journal of Urban Economics (Cui & Walsh, 2015; NBER Working Paper 20593) found that a foreclosure by itself did not raise neighborhood crime — but once the foreclosed home sat vacant, violent crime in its immediate vicinity rose roughly 19%, and the effect grew the longer the property stayed empty. For the blocks in Frayser, South Memphis, and Whitehaven where this quarter’s filings cluster, the difference between a foreclosed home that is quickly reoccupied and one that sits empty is, by that evidence, a public-safety question as much as a housing one.
6. Five law firms run more than two-fifths of the machine
Foreclosing lenders must appoint a substitute trustee — almost always a specialist law firm — to run the process. Just five firms were named in at least 143 of the quarter’s 341 filings (42%): AVT Title Services (43), Foundation Legal Group (30), Western Progressive Tennessee (25), Rubin Lublin TN (23), and Padgett Law Group (22). For anyone tracking where Memphis foreclosures are headed next, those five dockets are the place to watch.
7. Behind the mortgage pipeline, a tax-sale pipeline six times the quarter’s filings
Mortgage foreclosure isn’t the only way Shelby County residents lose homes. As of June 10, 2026, the County Trustee’s published tax-sale list — properties with delinquent property taxes — held 2,238 parcels: 676 assigned to Tax Sale 2301 (scheduled October 27, 2026) and 1,562 assigned to Tax Sale 2302, not yet scheduled. That standing inventory is more than six times the quarter’s 341 new foreclosure filings — and sixteen times the 140 foreclosures actually completed — though it is a separate process from every number above.
Quarter by quarter
| Quarter | Initiations (Appt. of Sub. Trustee) |
Completed sales (Sub. Trustee’s Deed) |
Sales as share of filings (same quarter) | Median completed- sale price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 Q1 | 325 | 119 | 36.6% | $123,000 |
| 2025 Q2 | 346 | 171 | 49.4% | $123,011 |
| 2025 Q3 | 271 | 148 | 54.6% | $131,806 |
| 2025 Q4 | 336 | 135 | 40.2% | $121,000 |
| 2026 Q1 | 341 | 140 | 41.1% | $107,050 |
Completed sales in a quarter generally stem from filings made in earlier quarters, so the ratio column compares same-quarter totals — it is not the share of those particular filings that ended in a sale. Many filings never reach sale: loans are reinstated, modified, paid off, or sales are postponed.
Where Q1 2026 foreclosure activity concentrated
Top 10 ZIP codes by initiations, among records with a resolvable property address.
| ZIP | Initiations (Q1 2026) | Completed sales (Q1 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| 38127 | 14 | 8 |
| 38106 | 13 | 5 |
| 38116 | 12 | 5 |
| 38109 | 10 | 14 |
| 38118 | 9 | 8 |
| 38002 | 9 | 2 |
| 38016 | 8 | 7 |
| 38104 | 8 | 3 |
| 38111 | 7 | 5 |
| 38017 | 7 | 3 |
ZIP resolved for 179 of 341 initiations and 134 of 140 completed sales; see methodology.
Show the full ZIP table (every resolvable ZIP, so you can check us)
| ZIP | Initiations (Q1 2026) | Completed sales (Q1 2026) |
|---|---|---|
| 38127 | 14 | 8 |
| 38106 | 13 | 5 |
| 38116 | 12 | 5 |
| 38109 | 10 | 14 |
| 38118 | 9 | 8 |
| 38002 | 9 | 2 |
| 38016 | 8 | 7 |
| 38104 | 8 | 3 |
| 38111 | 7 | 5 |
| 38017 | 7 | 3 |
| 38138 | 6 | 4 |
| 38125 | 6 | 3 |
| 38128 | 5 | 7 |
| 38018 | 5 | 6 |
| 38107 | 5 | 5 |
| 38117 | 5 | 5 |
| 38134 | 5 | 5 |
| 38053 | 5 | 4 |
| 38141 | 5 | 4 |
| 38133 | 5 | 3 |
| 38119 | 4 | 3 |
| 38135 | 4 | 0 |
| 38108 | 3 | 6 |
| 38112 | 3 | 6 |
| 38114 | 3 | 3 |
| 38115 | 3 | 2 |
| 38139 | 3 | 1 |
| 38122 | 2 | 6 |
| 38103 | 2 | 0 |
| 38105 | 2 | 0 |
| 38028 | 1 | 0 |
| 38344 | 0 | 1 |
One completion resolves to an out-of-county ZIP (38344) via its cross-referenced instrument; it is retained exactly as indexed.
Methodology
Foreclosure initiations are documents indexed as “Appointment of Substitute TR” and completed foreclosure sales are “Sub Trustees Deeds,” both from the Shelby County Register of Deeds public search index (search.register.shelby.tn.us), by recording date, January 1, 2025 – March 31, 2026. Data pulled June 10, 2026; the Register’s index was verified through June 8, 2026 at pull time. Records are deduplicated by instrument number; three records carrying null dates in the Register’s index were excluded. A 25-record sample spanning quarters and both document types was hand-checked against the Register’s site; all 25 matched on instrument number, type, and recording date (checked June 11, 2026). A 23-record subsample of the buyer classification was reviewed by hand: one assignment was contestable (a holding company that may be lender-affiliated); at most it would shift the investor share from 44% to 43%. No duplicate instrument numbers exist in the dataset, but the same property can appear in more than one filing across quarters, so per-day figures count filings, not necessarily distinct homes. The auction-buyer classification was applied identically to all five quarters for the trend comparison in Finding 2. Counts reflect recorded instruments: a single loan or property can generate more than one appointment over time, so document counts may slightly exceed unique-property counts. Trustee-firm totals count an instrument once per firm whenever any indexed grantee contains that firm’s name stem; name variants are grouped conservatively, so unmatched variants would only raise, not lower, the firm totals. Median sale prices are computed over deeds that record a consideration amount — 120 of 140 in Q1 2026, and between 107 and 156 per quarter across 2025.
Property ZIP codes come from the property description indexed on the instrument or, where absent, from the cross-referenced mortgage or deed of trust. Initiations resolve at a lower rate (179 of 341) than completions (134 of 140) because many appointments cross-reference older book-and-page-era instruments that carry no indexed address; ZIP figures describe resolvable records only.
Auction-buyer categories (Finding 2) classify the grantee names on Substitute Trustee’s Deeds: names containing bank/servicer/government-lender identifiers count as lender-side; other corporate markers (LLC, LP, trust, etc.) count as investment entities; personal names count as individuals. Four of 140 records list only the trustee or a title company and were excluded as ambiguous. The split is approximate by nature and is reported rounded.
External references: typical Memphis sale price ≈$200,000 per Redfin and Houzeo Memphis market pages (spring 2026); foreclosure-vacancy-crime research: Lin Cui & Randall Walsh, “Foreclosure, vacancy and crime,” Journal of Urban Economics 87 (2015), also NBER Working Paper 20593. This report does not measure crime and makes no causal claims about specific Memphis properties.
Tax-sale inventory is the Shelby County Trustee’s published tax-sale extract (shelbycountytrustee.com), downloaded June 10, 2026 — a point-in-time inventory, not a quarterly flow.
The Daily News public foreclosure notices (memphisdailynews.com) were reviewed on June 10, 2026 but excluded from counts: Tennessee trustee-sale notices typically run in multiple weekly insertions, so notice counts overstate unique foreclosures.
Counts reflect documents as indexed by the Register and may differ from measures based on auctions scheduled, notices published, or court actions. This report contains aggregate statistics only; no individual homeowner information is published.
If you are facing foreclosure: free HUD-approved housing counseling is available through the Homeowner’s HOPE Hotline at 888-995-4673, and a foreclosure filing does not mean the home is already lost — many loans are reinstated, modified, or paid off before auction. Journalists seeking the homeowner-side perspective can reach HUD-approved housing counseling agencies in Memphis via the directory at hud.gov.
About this report. Compiled by As-Is Home Buyer, a home-buying company that purchases homes directly from Shelby County owners. Disclosure: As-Is Home Buyer purchases homes directly from owners, including owners facing foreclosure — readers should weigh that interest; the report is built solely from the public records described above, the full ZIP-level aggregates are published in the expandable table in this report, and the quarterly aggregate dataset is available on request. Analysis by Nick Hedberg. Questions about the report or the underlying data: (901) 763-6616 · shelby.as-ishomebuyer.com/memphis. This report may be cited with attribution to “As-Is Home Buyer Shelby County Foreclosure Report.”
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