CoreLogic, a residential property information, analytics and services provider, released its January National Foreclosure Report, which provides data on completed U.S. foreclosures and foreclosure inventory. According to the report, there was a year-over-year decrease of 19 percent from January 2013 to January 2014 and an 11.8 percent increase between December 2013 and January 2014.
Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure. Since the financial crisis began in Sept. 2008, there were approximately 4.9 million completed foreclosures across the country.
In January 2014, approximately 794,000 homes in the United States were in some stage of foreclosure, known as the foreclosure inventory. This is compared to 1.2 million in January 2013, a year-over-year decrease of 33 percent. The foreclosure inventory in January represented 2 percent of all homes with a mortgage, compared to 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.
“We are recovering, but we’re not there yet,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “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 painful tide of high foreclosures continues to recede as fewer borrowers are losing their homes and states are working through their shadow inventory,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and chief executive officer of CoreLogic. “We are entering 2014 with less than a million homes in the foreclosure inventory. We expect to see continued progress in the months ahead, but the judicial foreclosure states will continue to lag the rest of the country in working down their backlogs of foreclosed properties.”
Highlights as of January 2014:
- The five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in January 2014 were Florida (116,000), Michigan (52,000), Texas (39,000), California (38,000) and Georgia (35,000). These five states account for almost half of all completed foreclosures nationally.
- The five states (including the District of Columbia) with the lowest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in January 2014 were District of Columbia (60), North Dakota (427), Hawaii (526), West Virginia (543) and Wyoming (732).
- 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).
- The five states with the lowest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were Wyoming (0.4 percent), Alaska (0.5 percent), North Dakota (0.6 percent), Colorado (0.5 percent) and Nebraska (0.6 percent).