Completed Foreclosures Drop to 66,000 in April: CoreLogic

In April, the number of completed foreclosures was 66,000, down 15 percent compared to the same month a year ago when there were 78,000 completed foreclosures, according to ""CoreLogic"":http://www.corelogic.com/. Month-over-month, the number of completed foreclosures remained unchanged.

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Since September 2008, there have been 3.6 million completed foreclosures.

The number of homes in foreclosure inventory as of April 2012 shrank slightly from 1.5 million homes a year ago to 1.4 million, which accounts for about 3.4 percent of all homes with a mortgage. The number stayed unchanged from the month before in March.

""There were more than 830,000 completed foreclosures over the past year or, in other words, one completed foreclosure for every 622 mortgaged homes,"" said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic.

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When breaking down the data based on judicial and non-judicial states, Fleming noted that non-judicial states such as Nevada, Arizona, and California completed two and a half times as many foreclosures over the past year as judicial foreclosure states.

Among the five states with the highest number of completed foreclosures - California (142,622), Florida (92,137), Michigan (60,198), Texas (57,536), and Georgia (56,894) â€" only Florida is a judicial state. These states alone account for 48.8 percent of all completed foreclosures nationally.

While non-judicial states completed more foreclosures, judicial states had high levels of foreclosure inventory.

The five states with the highest foreclosure inventory as a percentage of all homes with a mortgage were Florida (12 percent), New Jersey (6.7 percent), Illinois (5.3 percent), Nevada (5 percent) and New York (5 percent). With the exception of Nevada, all states are judicial.

On a more microscopic level, Core Based Statistical Areas (CBSAs) with the highest number of completed foreclosures were Phoenix (39,779); Atlanta (39,318); Riverside, California (28,315); Los Angeles (23,562); and Houston (16,904).

In the New York metro where foreclosure timelines tend to be longer compared to other states, there were 1096 mortgages per completed foreclosure. The number of mortgages per completed foreclosure is calculated by dividing the number of homes with a mortgage in each area by the sum of completed foreclosures for the prior 12 months. In Phoenix, there were only 18 mortgages per completed foreclosure.

CoreLogic is a provider of consumer, financial and property information, analytics and services for the public and private sectors.