Foreclosure Filings For 2017 Reached New Low, Report Says

Foreclosure filings in the U.S. for 2017 fell 27 percent compared to 2016, reaching their lowest level since 2005, according to a new 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.

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, in Delaware that number was 1.13 percent and in Maryland, 0.95 percent of housing units had a foreclosure filing.

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.

In 2017, lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 properties reaching a new all-time low since 2006. Counter to the national trend, the District of Columbia and five states — Illinois, Oklahoma, Louisiana, West Virginia and Vermont — had a year-over-year increase in foreclosure starts, according to the report.

Foreclosure auctions also saw a decrease overall.

According to ATTOM, 50 percent of all loans actively in foreclosure at the end of 2017 originated between 2004 and 2008. New York, New Jersey and Florida had the highest number of legacy foreclosures on loans.

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

You can read the full report from ATTOM Data here.

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