A new report has revealed that foreclosures in the USA are at their lowest level for 10 years.
ATTOM Data Solutions, the company in charge of the USA’s largest fused property database, has announced that foreclosures in the USA were at the lowest level in 2016 for the first time in a decade.
The firm released its Year-End 2016 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows that 933,045 foreclosure filings (including scheduled auctions, bank repossessions and default notices) were reported on US properties in 2016, down 14% from 2015 to the lowest level since 2006 – when 717,522 American properties foreclosed.
According to the report, 0.70% of all US housing units had at least one foreclosure filing in 2016 – the lowest annual foreclosure rate nationwide for ten years. In 2006, 0.58% of housing units had at least one foreclosure filing.
“The national foreclosure rate stayed within an historically normal range for the third consecutive year in 2016, even as banks continued to clear out legacy foreclosures from the last housing bubble, particularly in the final quarter of the year,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. “Foreclosures completed in the fourth quarter had been in the foreclosure process 803 days on average, a substantial jump from the third quarter and indicating that banks pushed through significant numbers of legacy foreclosures during the quarter. Despite that push, we still show that more than half of all active foreclosures nationwide are on loans originated between 2004 and 2008, with a much higher share of legacy foreclosures in some markets.”
ATTOM gathers its data by counting the number of unique properties with a foreclosure filing during a calendar year based on publicly recorded and published foreclosure filings collected in more than 2,500 American counties.