The number of completed foreclosures decreased yearly and increase slightly month-over-month in May, reported CoreLogic Friday.
The number of completed foreclosures last month totaled 63,000 compared to 77,000 in May 2011 and 62,000 in April 2012.
“Although the level of completed foreclosures remains high, it is down 27 percent from a peak of 1.1 million in all of 2010,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic.
Since September 2008, 3.6 million homes have been lost to foreclosure.
May also saw a yearly drop in the number of homes sitting in foreclosure inventory with about 1.4 million homes, or 3.4 percent, in foreclosure compared to 1.5 million, or 3.5 percent a year ago. Month-over-month, there was no change. Foreclosure inventory is the share of all homes in some stage of the foreclosure process.
“Though the national foreclosure inventory levels remain steady, around 1.4 million homes, there have been dramatic shifts at the state level,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic, who added that Nevada, Arizona, and Michigan each experienced at least a 20-percent decline in foreclosure inventory from a year ago.
However, there is a different trend for judicial states.
“While foreclosure inventories in most states are declining, the foreclosure inventory is still rising in many judicial states, such as Hawaii, New York, and Connecticut,” he said.
The top four states with the highest share of inventory in foreclosure were Florida (11.9 percent), New Jersey (6.6 percent), Illinois (5.3 percent) and New York (5.0 percent), and all four states are judicial. Judicial states require lenders to go through the courts before initiating a foreclosure whereas non-judicial foreclosure states allow lenders to start the foreclosure process without court intervention. Nevada (4.9 percent) had the fifth highest share of foreclosures and is a non-judicial state.
The two states with the lowest percentage of foreclosure inventory were Wyoming (0.7 percent)
and Alaska (0.8 percent) and both are non-judicial. The other top five states were North Dakota (0.8 percent), Nebraska (1.0 percent), and South Dakota (1.3 percent) and are judicial.
The five states with the highest yearly number of completed foreclosures on accounted for nearly half, 48.8 percent, of all completed foreclosures in the U.S.
The five states were California, which had 133,000 completed foreclosures, followed by Florida (92,000), Michigan (60,000), Texas (58,000), and Georgia (57,000).
The states with lowest yearly number of completed foreclosures were South Dakota (48), District of Columbia (74), North Dakota (547), West Virginia (620), and Hawaii (623).
CoreLogic is a provider of consumer, financial and property information, analytics and services to the public and private sectors.
