Foreclosure Activity Has Begun To Plateau – April Report

Kind of encouraging news is delivered by the latest Foreclosure Activity Report just released by Realtytrac. It is a welcome change no doubt, for those millions of distressed home owners, keeping their fingers crossed, after listing their properties in the sluggish market for sale. The pressure from the foreclosure properties competing for sale, at throw away prices will lessen. But there is another type of competition – this time from the Bank Repo properties, whose number has set a record high in April.

First the foreclosure statistics overall for the country: New foreclosure filings due to delinquencies by borrower-home owners of mortgage loans were increasing month after month, throughout last year in all parts of the country. Just for a change, the statistics for April 2010 shows a decline of 9 percent from March and surprisingly a 2 percent decrease compared to April 2009.

Total foreclosure filings reported for April – in all the three stages of foreclosure process –  default notices issued by lenders to those running behind mortgages; scheduled foreclosure auctions of Trustee Sale and Sheriff Sale; and repossessions by banks – were 333,837 US properties – one in every 387 housing units falling into foreclosure, in the month under report.

The break-up of the above figure under each category is:

Default Notices (including Notice of Default and Lis Pendens from Courts) – were issued on 103,762 properties totally.  This is a decrease comparatively by 12 percent from March and also decrease by 27 percent from the figure of April 2009 – when it was at the peak, on more than 142,000 properties.

Scheduled foreclosure sale public auction were earmarked on 137,643 properties during the month of April – in both Trustee Sale and Sheriff Sale. Again, this is a decrease by 13 percent from the peak of March, when 158,000 properties were facing foreclosure auction for the first time on record. However, foreclosure auctions this month increased by 1 percent from April 2009.

Repossessions by Bank, after foreclosure auction of properties, hit a record all time high of 92,432 in April – an increase by 1 percent from March – and decrease by 1 percent from the previous peak of 92,182 in December 2009 and increase by a whopping 45 percent compared to April 2009.

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