Even though serious mortgage delinquency and the foreclosure rate remained low, completed foreclosures continued to rise in January.
Borrowers who were 90 days or more past due made up 3.2 percent of all U.S. residential loan borrowers as of January. The last time the rate of serious mortgage delinquency was as low as it was in January was back in November 2007.
Those details and more were delivered Tuesday by CoreLogic Inc. in its National Foreclosure Report January 2016.
Serious delinquency was previously reported at 3.2 percent as of Dec. 31, 2015, and 4.0 percent as of Jan. 31, 2015.
Ninety-day delinquencies finished January 2016 at 7.5 percent in New Jersey, the worst rate in the nation. New York followed with a 6.2 percent serious delinquency rate, then 5.2 percent in Florida, 4.9 percent in Mississippi and 4.7 percent in Maine.
The lowest 90-day rate was in North Dakota: 1.0 percent.
There were preliminarily around 456,000 U.S. home loans that were in some stage of foreclosure as of Jan. 31, 2016, down from an upwardly revised 463,000 at the end of last year.
Foreclosures in process have tumbled since Jan. 31, 2015, when there were an upwardly revised 583,000. The foreclosure count has retreated on a year-over-year basis for 51 consecutive months.
The latest count left the foreclosure rate at a preliminary 1.2 percent as of Jan. 31, 2016 – “back to November 2007 levels,” CoreLogic said.
The foreclosure rate was previously reported at 1.1 percent a month earlier – apparently revised up since the original report – and was an upwardly revised 1.5 percent as of a year earlier.
New Jersey had the highest foreclosure rate as of the most-recent date: 4.3 percent. No. 2 New York’s rate was 3.5 percent, then Hawaii’s 2.4 percent, Florida’s 2.3 percent and the District of Columbia’s 2.3 percent.
The lowest foreclosure rate was in Alaska: 0.3 percent.
The preliminary number of U.S. homes repossessed was 38,000 – more than the upwardly revised 33,000 completed foreclosures in December 2015 and the second month in a row of deterioration.
In January 2015, mortgage servicers completed an upwardly revised 46,000 foreclosures.
Real-estate-owned filings are slowly returning to pre-crisis levels, when the monthly average was 21,000.
News Source: Mortgage Daily. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
