Home Delinquencies Fall; Foreclosures Rise

Fewer borrowers currently are delinquent on their home loans, a Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) report shows.  Curiously, new foreclosures are rising in states like California.  This is evidence that the nation still must endure significant pain before the housing crisis finally comes to an end.  According to some analysts, the nation is only halfway through the wrenching grip of the foreclosure epidemic.  That’s reflected in the housing market, where sales and prices continue to sag despite record low interest rates.  Five years after the crisis began, 7.99 percent of all mortgages were behind by at least one payment in the 3^rd quarter but not yet in foreclosure.  Nevertheless, that’s down by nearly half a percentage point from the 2^nd quarter and more than one percent when compared with last year.

The percentage of American mortgages that were somewhere in the foreclosure process at the end of the 3^rd quarter was 4.43 percent, a slight increase over last year.  The rate of homes in foreclosure was highest in the East and Midwest that route residential repossessions through the courts, with Florida at more than 14 percent and New Jersey at eight percent.

Rather surprisingly, new foreclosures rose to 1.08 percent of all loans from 0.96 percent in the prior three months, according to the MBA. The rate had been declining since the 3^rd quarter of 2010, when regulators began investigating robo-signing.  Some of the nation’s largest banks temporarily halted foreclosures while they addressed claims of flaws in their court documents.  The moratoriums clogged the entire foreclosure pipeline as banks investigated their procedures, said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight.  “Banks are starting to speed up the process now that they’ve cleaned up their paperwork,” Newport said.  “We’re seeing the backlog begin to move.”

Unfortunately, the improvement may be short lived.  For the 4^th quarter, the pace probably will slow to 2.3 percent, according to the median estimate among 86 economists surveyed by Bloomberg.  The pace likely will slow to two percent in the first three months of 2012, according to the estimates.  “While the delinquency picture changed for the better in the 3^rd quarter, the foreclosure data indicated that we are not out of the woods yet and that the issues continue to vary by geography,” Michael Fratantoni, the Mortgage Bankers Association’s vice president of research and economics, said.

“That’s really just reflecting the modest improvement we’ve seen in the economy broadly and the job market in particular,” Fratantoni said. “Job growth is not what we want it to be, but it’s been good enough to keep the unemployment rate at least level and that’s been beneficial here with fewer people falling behind.”

“While foreclosure activity in September and the 3^rd quarter continued to register well below levels from a year ago, there is evidence that this temporary downward trend is about to change direction, with foreclosure activity slowly beginning to ramp back up,” said James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac.  “Third quarter foreclosure activity increased marginally from the previous quarter, breaking a trend of three consecutive quarterly decreases that started in the fourth quarter of 2010,” according to Saccacio.  “This marginal increase in overall foreclosure activity was fueled by a 14 percent jump in new default notices, indicating that lenders are cautiously throwing more wood into the foreclosure fireplace after spending months trying to clear the chimney of sloppily filed foreclosures.”

Foreclosure were filed on 214,855 U.S. properties in September, a six percent decrease from August and a 38 percent decrease when compared with September of 2010.  September marked the 12^th consecutive month where foreclosure activity decreased on a year-over-year basis.

A report issued by the Center for Responsible Lending found that 6.4 percent of mortgages created between 2004 and 2008 ended in foreclosure.  Another 8.3 percent of mortgages are at “immediate, serious risk.”  According to Fratantoni, “Given the pace of foreclosure sales — about one million foreclosure sales a year — it’s a three- or four-year process to get it back to a more typical level of foreclosed properties.”

The refinance share of mortgage activity fell to 77.3 percent of total applications from 78.6 percent the previous week.  The adjustable-rate mortgage (ARM) share of activity increased to 6.1 percent from 5.8 percent of all applications.  In October, 50.6 percent of refinancing applications opted for fixed-rate 30-year loans, 28.8 percent opted for 15-year fixed loans and six percent went with ARMs.  In terms of applications for home purchase mortgages, 85.5 percent were for fixed-rate 30-year loans, 6.9 percent for 15-year fixed loans and 5.9 percent for ARMs, the lowest share of that vehicle for purchases since January.