Residential foreclosure numbers falling in the United States

The number of foreclosures in the United States is down marginally from a year ago and has levelled off over the first four months of 2012, according to the latest figures from analysts CoreLogic.

Approximately 1.4 million properties, or 3.4% of all homes with a mortgage, were in the national foreclosure inventory as of April 2012 compared to 1.5 million, or 3.5% in April 2011 and 1.4 million, or 3.4% in March 2012.
 
According to its April National Foreclosure Report, there were 66,000 completed foreclosures in April 2012 compared to 78,000 in April 2011 and 66,000 in March 2012. Since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008, there have been approximately 3.6 million completed foreclosures across the country. Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure.

‘There were more than 830,000 completed foreclosures over the past year or, in other words, one completed foreclosure for every 622 mortgaged homes. Non-judicial foreclosure markets, like Nevada, Arizona and California, completed two and a half times as many foreclosures over the past year as judicial foreclosure states,’ said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic.

‘The inventory of homes in foreclosure in judicial foreclosure states is growing, but this increase is being more than offset by declining inventories in non-judicial states where the processing timelines to clear a foreclosure are shorter,’ said Anand Nallathambi, chief executive officer of CoreLogic.
 
‘Nationally the inventory of homes in foreclosure decreased 0.1% from what it was a year ago at this time, and has levelled off over the first four months of 2012,’ added Nallathambi.

The five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in April 2012 were California with 142,000, Florida with 92,000, Michigan with 60,000, Texas with 58,000 and Georgia with 57,000. These five states account for 48.8% of all completed foreclosures nationally.

The five states with the lowest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in April 2012 were South Dakota with 62, District of Columbia with 162, North Dakota with 541, West Virginia with 598 and Hawaii with 601.

 The five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were Florida with 12%, New Jersey with 6.7%, Illinois with 5.3%, Nevada with 5% and New York also with 5%.

The five states with the lowest foreclosure inventory were Wyoming with 0.7%, Alaska with 0.8%, North Dakota with 0.9%, Nebraska WITH 1% and South Dakota with 1.4%.