Overall foreclosure filings were up 57% in November from a year ago. Still, foreclosure filings for November slid 5% from the month prior, with 30,677 U.S. properties having a default notice, scheduled auction, or bank repossession tied to them, according to a report from the real estate data analytics firm Attom.
The U.S. “may be at or near a peak level of foreclosure activity for 2022,” as foreclosure starts and completions have been rising from “last year’s artificially low levels,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of market intelligence at Attom, said in a statement.
Lenders repossessed 3,770 U.S. properties through completed foreclosures in November 2022, down 9% from the prior month, but up 64% on the same month last year, Attom, a cloud-based national property database, said.
That said, foreclosure starts in November are approximately 80% of pre-pandemic levels, Sharga said. “We may continue to see below-normal foreclosure activity,” he said, citing historically low unemployment rates and mortgage delinquency rates.
Regions with high rates of foreclosures
The foreclosure process began on nearly 20,700 U.S. properties last month, down 5% from October, Attom said, with the greatest number of foreclosure starts taking place in California, Texas, Florida, New York, and Illinois.
Of cities with more than one million residents, New York City, Chicago, Houston, Miami, and Los Angeles led the pack for the greatest number of foreclosure starts.
The cities with more than 200,000 people and the highest rates of foreclosure, meanwhile, were Cleveland, where 1 in every 1,913 units had a foreclosure filing in November, according to Attom; Columbia, S.C., where 1 in every 1,938 units had a foreclosure filing; and Davenport, Iowa, where 1 in every 2,000 units had a filing.
Bakersfield, Calif., and Atlantic City, N.J., also had higher rates of foreclosure filings at 1 in every 2,034 housing units and 1 in every 2,063 housing units, respectively.
The states with the highest rates of foreclosure were Illinois, where 1 in every 2,401 housing units had a foreclosure filing; Delaware, where 1 in every 2,736 units had a filing; New Jersey, where 1 in every 2,916 units had a filing; and Wyoming, where 1 in every 3,237 units had a filing.