June Sees 60,000 Completed Foreclosures: CoreLogic

In June, 60,000 homes turned into completed foreclosures compared to 80,000 foreclosures a year ago, ""CoreLogic"":http://www.corelogic.com/ reported Tuesday.

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The analytics company stated the yearly drop puts completed foreclosures at 2007 levels. Month-over-month, there was no reported change in completed foreclosures for June. Since September 2008, 3.7 million homes have been lost to foreclosure.

""The decline in the flow of completed foreclosures to pre-financial crisis levels is more welcome news pointing to an emerging housing market recovery,"" said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. ""However, we believe even more can be done to reduce the inventory of foreclosures by decreasing the level of regulatory uncertainty and expanding alternatives to foreclosure.""

The number of homes in national foreclosure inventory in June stood at 1.4 million, or 3.4 percent of all homes with a mortgage. June's figure is a slight drop from a year ago when the total was 1.5 million, or 3.5 percent. From May, the figure was unchanged. CoreLogic defines foreclosure inventory as the share of all mortgaged homes in some stage of the foreclosure process.

""While completed foreclosures and real-estate owned (REO) sales virtually offset each other over the past four months, producing static levels of foreclosure inventory for most of this year, they are beginning to diverge again,"" said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. ""Over the last two months REO sales declined while completed foreclosures leveled out. So we could see foreclosure inventory rising going forward.""

The states that saw the highest number of completed foreclosures over a one-year period since June 2012 were California, leading with 125,000, followed by Florida (91,000), Michigan (58,000), Texas (56,000) and Georgia (55,000).

The top five states accounted for 48.4 percent of all completed foreclosures nationally.

Florida (11.5 percent) led as the state with the highest share of inventory in foreclosure, with New Jersey (6.5 percent), New York (5.1 percent), Illinois (5.0 percent), and Nevada (4.8 percent) taking the next four spots.