Foreclosure Inventory Falls 29 Percent in June 2015

CoreLogic reports that the national foreclosure inventory fell 28.9 percent year over year in June 2015 to approximately 472,000 homes, or 1.2 percent of all homes with a mortgage. This marks 44 consecutive months of year-over-year declines (see Figure 1).

Also in June 2015, the 12-month sum of completed foreclosures decreased 17.9 percent, to 526,000, since June 2014. The seriously delinquent inventory fell to 1.3 million loans, a 23.3 percent year-over-year decline.

There were 48 states that posted year-over-year declines in the foreclosure inventory, and 32 of those states had decreases of more than 20 percent. The five states with the largest year-over-year drop in the foreclosure inventory were Florida (-47.7 percent), Connecticut (-36.9 percent), Michigan (-36.5 percent), Idaho (-35.4 percent) and Maryland (-34.4 percent). Only the District of Columbia (+18.1 percent), Massachusetts (+17.8 percent) and Wyoming (+4.1 percent) experienced year-over-year increases in the foreclosure inventory.

Figure 2 shows that judicial foreclosure states1 continued to have higher foreclosure rates in June 2015 than non-judicial states, averaging 2.1 percent and 0.6 percent, respectively. The foreclosure rate for judicial states peaked in February 2012 at 5.4 percent, while non-judicial states peaked at 2.5 percent in January 2011. As of June 2015, 42 percent of outstanding mortgages were in judicial states, but 71 percent of total loans in foreclosure were in those states.