Foreclosure

The news was all good on the delinquency front for October 2015 as all related metrics continued steep declines.

Borrowers who are owed relief funds under the Independent Foreclosure Review may lose that money if they do not meet the Fed's deadline for requesting a replacement check.

The state of Ohio is taking steps to remedy the vacant and abandoned property crisis, however, and the rest of the country may follow suit. A bill that would reduce foreclosure timelines and therefore shorten the amount of time that residential properties remain vacant in Ohio passed by a unanimous 88-0 vote in the Ohio House of Representatives earlier this week.

Mortgage delinquency rates continued their trend of year-over-year double-digit declines in the third quarter of 2015, which contributed to the strong performance of consumer credit markets during Q3, according TransUnion’s Q3 2015 Industry Insights Report released Monday.

The Sunshine State has fallen to third in foreclosure inventory rate (2.6 percent) behind New Jersey (4.6 percent) and New York (3.7 percent) and is getting closer to the national average, which was 1.2 percent during September. Florida had the highest decline of any state in foreclosure inventory year-over-year in September—a 42.3 percent drop, from 4.4 percent in September 2014.

The class action suits claim the insurance policies were automatically issued to homeowners at rates approved by lenders, which were much higher than market rates. Homeowners claim they did not have a choice in the matter, hence the term “forced placed insurance.”

Ask the Economist is an ongoing series in which DS News talks with an economist about the most pressing issues facing the nation's housing industry and the economy. This installment features Nela Richardson, Chief Economist with Redfin.

The number of completed foreclosures surged from 37,000 in August up to 55,000 in September, an increase of 49.5 percent, largely due to an annual public auctioning of thousands of tax-foreclosed properties in Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is the county seat, according to CoreLogic. By comparison, foreclosure completions averaged about 21,000 per month in the pre-recession years from 2000 to 2006.

In August 2015, the GSEs completed 17,806 foreclosure prevention actions, over half of which (11,382) were permanent loan modifications. August’s total included both home retention actions and home forfeiture actions and brought the total of foreclosure prevention actions completed by the GSEs to 3,578,227 since the conservatorships began in September 2008.

Despite substantial declines over the last three to four years, especially in the last year, the rate of foreclosure inventory—that is, the percentage of residential properties that were in some state of foreclosure—remains about two and a half times its “normal” or pre-recession level, according to Black Knight Financial Services’ September 2015 Mortgage Monitor released Monday.