Foreclosed homes hit a 12-year low in 2017, as well as the distressed properties remain increasingly hard to come by in the majority of markets. Foreclosure filings in 2017 – including default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions – dropped to the lowest level since 2005.
Foreclosed homes drop to 12-year low
In whole, foreclosure filings were reported on 676,535 U.S. properties in 2017. Signifying just 0.51 percent of all housing units in the united states. Filings were down 76 percent from a peak of nearly 2.9 million in 2010, ATTOM Data Solutions, a real estate data firm, reports in its newly released 2017 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report.
For 2017, ATTOM reports Florida had:
24,215 scheduled foreclosure auctions scheduled for a 45% drop as compared to 2016
29,258 foreclosure starts for a 28% decrease compared to 2016
26,544 bank repossessions for a 44% decline when compared with 2016
“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,” says Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions.
Blomquist says a couple of U.S. markets are exceptions to the dropping foreclosure rule, however.
“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,” he says.
Foreclosure starts are at a new record low nationwide. Lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 properties in 2017, down 82% from a peak of more than 2 million in 2009. That marks a new all-time low for foreclosure start data since ATTOM Data Solutions began collecting such data in 2006.
Just a few markets are countering that trend. As an example, the District of Columbia and five states posted year-over-year increases in foreclosure starts in 2017, consisting of Washington, D.C. (up 54%); West Virginia (up 32%); Vermont (up 27%); Oklahoma (up 23%); Illinois (up 2%); and Louisiana (up 2%).
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