Foreclosure inventory declined yet again in June, but completed foreclosures, while down from last year, increased from last month, according to CoreLogic, property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider.
CoreLogic’s June 2016 National Foreclosure Report showed the inventory declined 25.9% from last year, and completed foreclosures declined 4.9%. On the other hand, completed foreclosures increased 5.1% to 38,000 from last month.
For comparison, during the housing boom, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month from 2000 to 2006.
Even though completed foreclosures increased from last month, foreclosure inventory still saw a monthly decline of 3.6%.
According CoreLogic’s report last month, May’s foreclosure inventory hit the lowest level in nearly nine years.
Last month’s report from RealtyTrac also shows that more homeowners are keeping their homes out of foreclosure than ever before, down 17% from one year ago and the lowest level for any half-year period since RealtyTrac began tracking foreclosure starts in 2006, the company said.
The foreclosure inventory is the number of homes at some stage of the foreclosure process while completed foreclosures show the total number of homes lost to foreclosure.
"The impact of the inexorable reduction over the past several years in both foreclosure trends and serious delinquencies is driving the long-awaited return to more historic norms for the U.S. housing market," CoreLogic President and CEO Anand Nallathambi said.
"We expect the combination of continued home price appreciation of more than 5% and rising employment levels in the year ahead will help cement the gains we have had and perhaps accelerate them," Nallathambi said.
In June, the national foreclosure inventory included about 375,000, or 1%, of homes with a mortgage. This is down from last year when foreclosure inventory consisted of 507,000 homes, or 1.3%.
In fact, the foreclosure inventory rate is the lowest for any month since August 2007.
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(Source: CoreLogic)
The number of mortgages in serious delinquency, those 90 days or more past due, in foreclosure or real estate owned, hit the lowest rate since September 2007. The serious delinquency rate decreased 21.3% annually. Now, 2.8% of homes are considered seriously delinquent.
"Mortgage loan performance depends on the economic health of local markets, with varied differences even within a state," CoreLogic Chief Economist Frank Nothaft said. "Within Texas, the serious delinquency rate in the Dallas metropolitan area has fallen by 0.5% from a year earlier, as home prices and employment have continued to rise.”
“The rate in the Midland area, on the other hand, has jumped 0.5%, reflecting the weakness in oil production and job loss over the past year," Nothaft said.
The state with the highest number of completed foreclosures in the 12 months ending in June 2016 was Florida at 60,000, followed by Michigan at 47,000, Texas at 27,000, Ohio at 23,000 and California at 22,000. These states account for nearly 40% of all completed foreclosures nationally.
On the other hand, the area that had the lowest number of completed foreclosures was the District of Columbia at 179, followed by North Dakota at 321, West Virginia at 487, Alaska at 639 and Montana at 675.
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(Source: CoreLogic)
