[1]For the 11th consecutive month, Florida was the state that owned the highest foreclosure rate in the nation, according to RealtyTrac [2]'s monthly U.S. Foreclosure Market Report for August 2014 [3] released September 11.
RealtyTrac reported one foreclosure filing for every 400 housing units in the Sunshine State in August, which was almost three times the national average of one in every 1,126 properties. In all, Florida had foreclosure starts on 6,468 properties for August, a leap of 74 percent from July and 24 percent from August 2013.
Florida's year-over-year gain in foreclosure starts for August ended a string of 17 consecutive months of annual decreases, according to RealtyTrac.
After Florida, the states with the next highest foreclosure rates for August were Nevada (one in every 524 housing units), Maryland (1:532), New Jersey (1:553), and Georgia (1:582).
Of the 10 metro areas with a population of more than 200,000 that had the highest foreclosure rates in the nation in August, seven of them were located in Florida, according to RealtyTrac. The top two were Macon, Georgia (one in every 154 housing units) and Atlantic City, New Jersey (1:292), and the remaining eight of the top 10 were in Florida: Orlando (third, 1:294), Jacksonville (fourth, 1:300), Miami (fifth, 1:359), Palm Bay-Melbourne-Titusville (sixth, 1:368), Tampa (seventh, 1:407), Pensacola (eighth, 1:426), Cape Coral-Fort Myers (ninth, 1:430), and Lakeland (10th, 1:441).
In all of these top 10 markets except for two, foreclosure activity increased year-over-year in August, RealtyTrac reported. The only two outliers were Miami and Tampa with declines of 10 percent and 14 percent, respectively.