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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A local bankruptcy attorney says there hasn’t been a spike in bankruptcy filings because of the coronavirus crisis, but he fully expects that to happen in the near future.

“People can’t really be collected against right now, so there’s not really any reason to file bankruptcy yet,” Colin Gotham said. “And so you would expect it to be something in late May or into June or even later.”

Gotham suspects it will impact many industries, including real estate.

“I would expect that there’s going to be at some point a flood of foreclosures,” Gotham said. “That would damage the market because with so much new product coming onto it, you would expect that to impact prices.”

Locally, the real estate industry is coming off a difficult month, but agents are still staying busy.

“I put a house on the market Thursday. We had 10 showings and two offers,” said Jocelyn Rivard with Keller Williams Northland Partners.

For the month of March, real estate listings were down 22% in the metro, and across the entire state of Missouri, property showings were down 36% for that same timespan.

Even so, Rivard is optimistic her industry will bounce back faster than the recovery following the 2008 recession.

“If people feel safe going out and looking, I do think there’s going to be a lot of pent up demand,” Rivard said. “And maybe the fall market is going to look like our traditional spring market, in terms of busyness.”