What is the current national foreclosure rate?
Oct 25, 2008 in
Financial and Loan Tips
Laissez-Faire Guy
I keep seeing in the news that foreclosure’s are up XX% in the last year. What they never say is what the foreclosure rate actually is. I mean if it’s up to 4% from 3%, that’s a dramatic 33% increase, but it also means that there are still 96% of people still paying their mortgages.
I keep seeing in the news that foreclosure’s are up XX% in the last year. What they never say is what the foreclosure rate actually is. I mean if it’s up to 4% from 3%, that’s a dramatic 33% increase, but it also means that there are still 96% of people still paying their mortgages.
I just want to know what the real number is.
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5 comments
Johnny 2 Times on October 27, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I believe the current foreclosure rate is somewhere around 1 new foreclosure for every 560 households.
That indicates a percentage foreclosure rate of about .2%, meaning 99.8% of households are not in foreclosure.
Rush is a band on October 29, 2008 at 12:25 am
The article I read today said that 1 in 538 mortgages are in the foreclosure process…
So, 0.2% or so. This is an almost 100% increase from last year. Some regional markets are disasters with up to 5% of houses in foreclosure (Stockton, CA is one example).
The news makes it sound a lot more scary, no?
good luck!
godged on October 31, 2008 at 6:26 pm
Oh yes, I just heard on the noon news that the foreclosure rate is up 57% from this time last year. It is still less than 1% in most areas. The media has to put a gloom and doom spin on everything.
enoriverbend on November 1, 2008 at 12:48 am
In addition to the other points above, which are correct, foreclosure continues to differ a lot by location. Quoting “national” foreclosure figures glosses over these differences. For example, California and Florida account for over 30% of new foreclosures recently.
Many other states have very few — in fact, my zip code has just 2 active foreclosures. So a national foreclosure rate is misleading if it lumps in California and Florida with states that have no real foreclosure problem. You may be interested in this map:
The etiology is also different between California, where we had a lot of evidence of bubble-like behavior in the housing market over the last few years, and the upper Midwest, where we have seen increasing foreclosure rates that *precede* the latest credit storm, which are due to widespread unemployment as the Rust Belt continues to rust.
“All real estate issues are local.” — including this one.
Also — and I think you may have assumed this already — subprime loans account for over 50% of the foreclosures even though they only represent 13% of all mortgages. (Prime ARMS are slightly overrepresented but not nearly as much.) But even when we drill down by loan type (prime vs subprime, ARM versus fixed), there is still a lot of difference among the various states.
wider scope on November 1, 2008 at 10:35 am
Whatever they are, it can be blamed on not our economy, but the likes of all the Al Gores, the slum lord friends of Obama and Hillary’s friend the mega-mogul, Warren Buffet, who have raped and pillaged our lower classes with high risk loans that they knew they would be taking back with the quickness of light.