ATTOM: 2017 Foreclosure Activity Drops to 12-Year Low
ATTOM Data Solutions, Irvine, Calif., released its Year-End 2017 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows foreclosure filings fell by 27 percent from 2016 and down by 76 percent from its peak to the lowest level since 2005.
ATTOM said the 676,535 properties with foreclosure filings in 2017 represented 0.51 percent of all U.S. housing units, down from 0.70 percent in 2016 and down from a peak of 2.23 percent in 2010, to the lowest level since 2005.
The report also reported data for December, when there were 64,651 U.S. properties with foreclosure filings, up 1 percent from November but down by 25 percent from a year ago, the 27th consecutive month with a year-over-year decrease in foreclosure activity.
“Thanks to a housing boom driven primarily by a scarcity of supply, which has helped to limit home purchases to the most highly qualified–and low-risk–borrowers, the U.S. housing market has the luxury of playing a version of foreclosure limbo in which it searches for how low foreclosures can go,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president with ATTOM Data Solutions. “There are a few notable local market exceptions playing a different version of foreclosure limbo in which a backlog of legacy foreclosure activity left over from the last housing crisis is still winding its way through a labyrinthine foreclosure process, resulting in incongruous jumps in various stages of foreclosure activity in markets such as New York, New Jersey and D.C.”
The report said lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 U.S. properties in 2017, down 20 percent from 2016 and down 82 percent from a peak of 2.139 million in 2009 to a new low going back as far as 2006. ATTOM said 318,165 U.S. properties were scheduled for public foreclosure auction in 2017, down 27 percent from 2016 and down from a peak of 1.6 million in 2010.
The report said lenders repossessed 291,579 properties through foreclosure in 2017, down 23 percent from 2016 and down 72 percent from a peak of 1.050 million in 2010 to the lowest level since 2006, an 11-year low.
States with the highest foreclosure rates in 2017 were New Jersey (1.61 percent of housing units with a foreclosure filing); Delaware (1.13 percent); Maryland (0.95 percent); Illinois (0.86 percent); and Connecticut (0.78 percent). Among 217 metropolitan statistical areas with a population of at least 200,000, those with the highest foreclosure rates in 2017 were Atlantic City, N.J. (2.72 percent of housing units with a foreclosure filing); Trenton, N.J. (1.68 percent); Philadelphia (1.26 percent); Fayetteville, N.C. (1.17 percent); and Rockford, Ill. (1.14 percent).
The report said properties foreclosed in the fourth quarter had been in the foreclosure process an average of 1,027 days, a 14 percent jump from the previous quarter and a 28 percent increase from a year ago to the longest since ATTOM began tracking average foreclosure timelines in Q1 2007. States with the longest average time to foreclose in the fourth quarter were Indiana (2,370 days); Nevada (1,933 days); Florida (1,493 days); New Jersey (1,298 days) and Georgia (1,263 days).
