At 812 days, the U.S. average is 11% longer than
"While patterns differ in some states, the national trend over the past year shows that foreclosures are taking an average of about 24 to 27 months to wind through the courts or get settled with borrowers negotiating new loan terms that let them keep their homes," Attom CEO Rob Barber said in an email, noting that this is in line with the period just prior to the pandemic.
It's far better than it was at COVID-19's height, when timelines gapped out to 30-40 months in late 2020 as a massive foreclosure moratorium sidelined 70% of all mortgages. Times remained elevated after mid-2021 when the ban was lifted, only subsiding a bit in the last year.
The current numbers may mean that overhang from the pandemic's foreclosure moratoria may have been worked through, normalizing processing, although there are wild cards the
"The latest timeline suggests that residential foreclosure-case backlogs are settling back down overall throughout the United States to levels at or close to what was happening right before the COVID pandemic hit," Barber said, referring to the period between 2018 and early 2020.
In line with that, foreclosure starts decreased in the latest report, and at 130,369, these were down 3.5% from last year's first half and 32% below the number seen in the initial six months of 2020.
Default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions totaled 177,431 for the first half of 2024, a 4.4% reduction compared to the same period last year. However, they were up 7.8% from two years prior.
That said, even the states and metropolitan areas with the most activity have very low foreclosure rates well below 1%.
Illinois and New Jersey both had foreclosure rates of 0.21% in the first half of this year. The most active metropolitan areas during that period were Lakeland, Florida, at 0.32%, and Columbia, South Carolina, at 0.31%.
The range of timelines is much more dramatic than what's seen in foreclosure rates. While the average for the former is around two years and in the Bayou State foreclosure can take a decade, it can be done in as little as 82 days in New Hampshire.
Whether a state has a foreclosure regime that requires court involvement or calls for a non-judicial process can play a big role on how long its timelines are.
"There surely are other reasons behind the national and state trend lines that could be addressed by state and regional experts, but the pandemic clearly had a lot to do with the rise and fall in foreclosure time frames," Barber said.
