U.S. Home Foreclosure Inventory Down 25 Percent Year Over Year

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According to CoreLogic's April 2015 National Foreclosure Report, national U.S. foreclosure inventory declined by 24.9 percent and completed foreclosures declined by 19.8 percent from April 2014. There were 40,000 completed foreclosures nationwide in April 2015, down from 50,000 in April 2014, representing a decrease of 65.8 percent from the peak of completed foreclosures in September 2010.

Completed foreclosures are an indication of the total number of homes actually lost to foreclosure. Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 5.7 million completed foreclosures across the country, and since homeownership rates peaked in the second quarter of 2004, there have been approximately 7.8 million homes lost to foreclosure.

As of April 2015, the national foreclosure inventory included approximately 521,000 homes, or 1.4 percent, of all homes with a mortgage compared with 694,000 homes, or 1.8 percent, in April 2014.

CoreLogic also reports that the number of mortgages in serious delinquency (defined as 90 days or more past due, including those loans in foreclosure or REO) declined by 22.1 percent from April 2014 to April 2015, with 1.4 million mortgages, or 3.6 percent, falling into this category. This is the lowest serious delinquency rate since February 2008. On a month-over-month basis, the number of seriously delinquent mortgages declined by 3 percent.

"By mid-2011, after the Great Recession and at the trough of the house-price collapse, more than 1.5 million homes were in the foreclosure pipeline," said Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic. "Employment recovery, foreclosure alternatives, and home-value gains have worked to reduce this inventory. At CoreLogic, we found that April's foreclosure inventory was down 25 percent from a year ago, falling to one-third the mid-2011 level."

"Despite a slow and steady improvement in most housing market fundamentals, too many families remain in default of their mortgage obligations," said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. "The percent of homeowners with a mortgage that have missed three-or-more monthly payments or are in foreclosure proceedings dropped to 3.6 percent in our April data; while well below the record peak of nearly 9 percent and the lowest in more than seven years, it remains about double the pre-2007 rate."

Additional highlights as of April 2015:

• On a month-over-month basis, completed foreclosures decreased by 1.1 percent from the 40,000* reported in March 2015. As a basis of comparison, before the decline in the housing market in 2007, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006.

• The five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in April 2015 were: Florida (106,000), Michigan (49,000), Texas (33,000), Ohio (28,000) and Georgia (27,000). These five states accounted for almost half of all completed foreclosures nationally.

• Four states and the District of Columbia had the lowest number of completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in April 2015: South Dakota (20), the District of Columbia (95), North Dakota (318), West Virginia (475) and Wyoming (498).

• On a month-over-month basis, the foreclosure inventory was down by 2.2 percent from March 2015. The April 2015 foreclosure rate of 1.4 percent is back to early 2008 levels.

• Four states and the District of Columbia had the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes: New Jersey (5.1 percent), New York (3.8 percent), Florida (3.1 percent), Hawaii (2.6 percent) and the District of Columbia (2.5 percent).

• The five states with the lowest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were: Alaska (0.3 percent), Nebraska (0.4 percent), North Dakota (0.4 percent), Colorado (0.4 percent) and Minnesota (0.5 percent).