ATTOM: Zombie Foreclosures Remain Low

(Image courtesy of ATTOM; Breakout image courtesy of Robert So via pexels.com)

ATTOM, Irvine, Calif., released its fourth-quarter 2024 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report. It found zombie foreclosures ticked up slightly from Q3, but remain below Q4 2023’s number.

ATTOM found that 1.3% of homes are vacant in the U.S., or a total of 1,355,909. That’s flat from Q3, and up slightly from Q4 2023.

There are 215,601 residential properties in the process of foreclosure, down 3.3% from Q3 and down 32.8% from Q4 2023.

Among those pre-foreclosure properties, about 7,100 can be defined as “zombie foreclosures”–pre-foreclosure properties that have been abandoned. That’s up slightly from Q3, but down 20.2% from Q4 2023.

Zombie foreclosures amount to one of every 14,591 homes, flat from last quarter’s 14,776. In Q4 2023, that number stood at 11,412.

Overall, Zombie foreclosures continue to have very little impact on local housing markets.

“The near-total disappearance of zombie foreclosures has been and still is one of the more subtle, but important benefits of the country’s soaring housing market. Those properties have gone from a plague in many areas of the U.S. following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, when millions of homes fell into foreclosure, to a distant memory in most communities today,” said Rob Barber, CEO for ATTOM. “That’s unlikely to change much in the near future given that record home prices are keeping home-equity levels at historic highs and foreclosure cases [are] dropping. On top of that, the supply of homes is so tight that even when a property is abandoned, buyers are more likely to swoop in and pick it up.”