MA Foreclosure Rate Higher Than National Average: New Report

Massachusetts had a higher than average rate of foreclosure filings in the United States for 2017, according to a new report. The total number of housing units with foreclosure filings in Massachusetts for the year represented 0.54 percent of total housing units in the state, but overall the number of foreclosure filings decreased compared to 2016.

Nationally, foreclosure filings for 2017 fell 27 percent compared to 2016, reaching their lowest level since 2005, according to the report. There were 676,535 properties with foreclosure filings in 2017, a 76 percent drop from when such filings were at a peak during the housing crisis in 2010.

The properties with foreclosure filings in 2017 represented 0.51 percent of all U.S. housing units, according to ATTOM Data, a multi-sourced property database. When filings were at a peak during the housing crisis, they represented 2.23 percent of all U.S. housing units.

In 2017, lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 properties and 8,944 of those properties were in Massachusetts, according to the report. Worcester, Middlesex, Plymouth, and Essex counties had the highest number of properties where the foreclosure process had started, according to the report. Nationally, 318,165 properties were scheduled for foreclosure auction in 2017 and just over 5,529 of those properties were in New Jersey.

The state followed the national trend on foreclosure starts and auctions, seeing a decrease in both compared to 2016.

New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut had the highest foreclosure rates in 2017. In Delaware, 1.13 percent of housing units had a foreclosure filing and in Maryland that number was 0.95 percent, according to the report.

South Dakota, North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi had the lowest rates of foreclosure filings in the U.S. for 2017, according to the report.

“Thanks to a housing boom driven primarily by a scarcity of supply, which has helped to limit home purchases to the most highly qualified — and low-risk — borrowers, the U.S. housing market has the luxury of playing a version of foreclosure limbo in which it searches for how low foreclosures can go,” Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions, said in a press release.

The report is based on publicly recorded and published foreclosure filings collected from more than 2,500 counties nationwide.

You can read the full report from ATTOM Data here.

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