Thursday, February 27, 2014, 12:11pm CoreLogic: 48,000 Completed Foreclosures In January

The number of U.S. foreclosures dropped to 19 percent in January compared with last year, while the foreclosure inventory shrank by a third, according to a new report from real estate data and analytics firm CoreLogic. The 48,000 completed foreclosures were an 11.8 percent increase from the 43,000 reported in December 2013, however.
Prior to the housing crash, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 4.9 million completed foreclosures across the country.
As of January 2014, approximately 794,000 homes in the United States were in some stage of foreclosure, known as the foreclosure inventory, compared with 1.2 million in January 2013, a year-over-year decrease of 33 percent. The foreclosure inventory as of January represented 2 percent of all homes with a mortgage, compared with 2.9 percent in January 2013. The foreclosure inventory was down 3.3 percent from December 2013, representing the 27th month of year-over-year decline.
In Massachusetts, 1.3 percent of homes were in some stage of foreclosure, below the national average and down 0.7 percent from the same time last year. The serious delinquency rate in the Bay State was 4.7 percent, also below the national average of 5 percent, according to CoreLogic.
“We are recovering, but we’re not there yet,” Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic, said in a statement. “For every completed foreclosure, there are 954 mortgaged homes in non-judicial foreclosure states and 896 mortgaged homes in judicial foreclosure states. Although this is a big improvement relative to the height of the foreclosure crisis, a healthier ratio would be one for every 2000.”
The five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were Florida (6.4 percent), New Jersey (6.3 percent), New York (4.8 percent), Connecticut (3.4 percent) and Maine (3.4 percent).

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