While activity related to distressed mortgage loans continues to grind its way back to normal levels, CoreLogic says that 17 of the 25 judicial foreclosure states still have delinquency levels at or above the national rate of 4.0 percent. Only five of the 26 non-judicial jurisdictions had rates that high. .
CoreLogic says that there were 1.5 million mortgages that were seriously delinquent (90 or more days past due) in February, down 19.3 percent from one year earlier and 1.1 percent from January. The national delinquency rate is the lowest since June 2008.
The foreclosure inventory, that is homes that are in the process of foreclosure, consisted of 553,000 mortgaged properties in February, a 27.3 percent decrease from February 2014 when an estimated 761,000 homes were actively in foreclosure. The inventory this past February represented 1.4 percent of all mortgaged homes, down from 1.9 percent a year earlier and back to March 2008 levels. Eighteen judicial foreclosure states were above that national average while among non-judicial jurisdictions only Nevada (2.2 percent), Rhode Island (1.6 percent), and the District of Columbia (2.6 percent) exceeded it. On a month-over-month basis, the foreclosure inventory was down by 1.4 percent from January 2015.
The five jurisdictions with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of mortgaged homes were New Jersey (5.3 percent), New York (4.0 percent), Florida (3.4 percent), Hawaii (2.8 percent) and the District of Columbia (2.6 percent).
Completed foreclosures declined by 15.7 percent from the previous year, from 46,000 to 39,000. This is a decrease of 67 percent from the peak of bank repossessions in September 2010. CoreLogic estimates there have been approximately 5.6 million homes lost to foreclosure since September 2008 which is generally viewed as the beginning of the foreclosure crisis. Between 2000 and 2006 there were an average of 21,000 foreclosures in the U.S. each month. Completed foreclosures in February were down 11.6 percent from the 44,000 reported in January.
The highest numbers of completed foreclosures in the 12 months ending in February were in Florida (110,000), Michigan (50,000), Texas (34,000), California (30,000) and Georgia (28,000). These five states accounted for almost half of all completed foreclosures nationally.
"The number of homes in foreclosure proceedings fell by 27 percent from a year ago and stands at about one-third of what it was at the trough of the housing cycle," said Frank Nothaft, chief economist at CoreLogic. "While the drop in the share of mortgages in foreclosure to 1.4 percent is a welcome sign of continued recovery in the housing market, the share remains more than double the 0.6 percent average foreclosure rate that we saw during 2000-2004."
"The foreclosure inventory dropped year over year in all but two states," said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. "The foreclosure rates in judicial foreclosure states are beginning to pick up and remain higher than in non-judicial states. What's encouraging is that fewer Americans are seriously delinquent in paying their mortgages, which in turn is reducing the foreclosure inventory across the country as a whole."
