Bay State Foreclosure Deeds Jump in January

According to a report released today by Boston-based ""The Warren Group"":http://www.thewarrengroup.com, foreclosure deeds in Massachusetts climbed during the month of January. Foreclosure petitions were also up from December, but actually declined 39 percent from a year earlier, the research company said.
Looking at statistics from ""Warrengroupforeclosures.com"":http://www.WarrenGroupForeclosures.com, a total of 974 foreclosure deeds were recorded in the Bay State in January. The data represents a 21.8 percent increase from the 800 recorded in January 2008, and 4 percent more than the 936 documented in December of last year.
However, The Warren Group pointed out that lenders started fewer foreclosure proceedings in January compared to a year ago. Lenders filed 1,960 petitions to foreclose on properties in Massachusetts in January, a 39 percent decline from the 3,212 petitions filed in January 2008. Still, foreclosure petitions jumped 20.6 percent from December when there were 1,625 foreclosures initiated. Foreclosure petitions, which are filed in Massachusetts Land Court, represent the first step in the foreclosure process.
Timothy M. Warren Jr., CEO of The Warren Group, commented, ""Several large banks and lending institutions have recently suspended foreclosures and lenders are facing more political pressure to slow down and work with borrowers, so that could be why there has been a 39 percent drop in the number of foreclosure petitions compared to a year earlier.""
Warren added that ""the pace of foreclosure deed recordings has actually remained fairly steady in Massachusetts over the last four months. We know that it can take many months between the time that a foreclosure is initiated and an actual foreclosure takes place, so some of the foreclosures that occurred in January could have been initiated during the first quarter of 2008 when lenders were filing about 3,000 foreclosure petitions per month.""
According to a recent report in Banker & Tradesman, published by The Warren Group, the foreclosure process is taking on average three months longer than it did just two years ago. The process, from the time a lender filed a petition to foreclose to when a foreclosure deed was recorded, took an average of 342 days in 2008 compared to 253 days in 2006.
The Warren Group tracked 1,300 Massachusetts auction announcements in January, down 22.8 percent from 1,684 in January 2008, and up 7.8 percent from 1,206 in December.