Michigan Foreclosure Filings Decline In 2017

The number of foreclosures in Michigan dropped remarkably in 2017 from 2005 when the nation edged toward a financial crisis later in the decade, according to a new report. The state of Michigan, when compared to all other states, is ranked 35th for its rate of foreclosure filings, the report shows.

The total number of housing units with foreclosure filings in Michigan for the year represented 0.30 percent of total housing units in the state, but overall the number of foreclosure filings decreased by 42.5 percent compared to 2016. In Michigan last year, there were 13,765 foreclosure proceedings filed, compared to 23,958 in 2016.

Those numbers pale in comparison to the number of foreclosure filings on Michigan homes in the late-2000s – in 2008, there were 106,058 foreclosures, 118,302 in 2009 and 135,874 in 2010.

Nationally, foreclosure filings for 2017 fell 27 percent compared to 2016, reaching their lowest level since 2005, according to the report. There were 676,535 properties with foreclosure filings in 2017, a 76 percent drop from when such filings were at a peak during the housing crisis in 2010.

The properties with foreclosure filings in 2017 represented 0.51 percent of all U.S. housing units, according to ATTOM Data, a multi-sourced property database. When filings were at a peak during the housing crisis, they represented 2.23 percent of all U.S. housing units.

In 2017, lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 properties and 7,881 of those properties were in Michigan, according to the report. The counties in Michigan that had the highest number of properties where the foreclosure process had started in 2017 were Wayne (1,674), Macomb (789), Oakland (741), Genesee (484) and Kent (404), according to the report.

New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut had the highest foreclosure rates in 2017. In New Jersey, 1.61 percent of housing units had a foreclosure filing, while in Delaware, 1.13 percent had a foreclosure filing and in Maryland that number was 0.95 percent, according to the report.

South Dakota, North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi had the lowest rates of foreclosure filings in the U.S. for 2017, according to the report.

“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,” Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions, said in a press release.

The report is based on publicly recorded and published foreclosure filings collected from more than 2,500 counties nationwide.

>>> Read the full report from ATTOM Data here

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