Foreclosures Drop Due To Paperwork Halt
The number of US foreclosures has dropped as banks had put a halt on the processing of foreclosure documents.
October figures show a 9 percent drop in the number of US home foreclosures as banks had halted dubious paperwork that prompted an investigation over alleged improper bank foreclosure practices that included robo-signing claims.
A Real Estate foreclosures services provider said that bank foreclosures declined heavily in October with only 93,236 foreclosures compared to the 100,000 foreclosures filed in September. The total filings in Octobers are also 4 percent short of the September filings,
equal to the level posted last year. These figures were largely due to the moratorium that the largest US banks have imposed on their own in order to review loan documents and affidavits.
But the research firm stressed that the numbers could have probably been higher were it not for the fact that banks had imposed foreclosure freezes in response to the foreclosure controversy. The figures actually hardly show that the market has already improved and that borrowers are beginning to recover from financial constraints.
Still, the highest foreclosure rates are found in Nevada, Florida and Arizona. However, only five states account for the half of the nation’s foreclosure activities – California, Florida, Michigan, Illinois and Arizona.
Nevada’s foreclosure rate is at least 5 times higher than the national average with one in every 79 homes foreclosure filings and almost doubles the Florida rate of 1 in every 155 units.
But despite the slowdown, the firm says it still expects the figures to gain record levels which could be seen in the following months as pending foreclosures have not yet been taken into account.
By the end of this year, there will probably be a record 1.2 million bank repossessions. At the moment, there are still a million bank-owned properties that are pending foreclosures while around 300,000 of these are now being actively sold to potential buyers.
It can be recalled that banks were only able to repossess about a hundred thousand housing units in 1995, just shortly before the housing bust.
