Loans late by 90 days or more are increasingly concentrated in parts of Florida, Georgia and southeast Texas as
Florida displaced Mississippi as the state with the biggest percentage of severe delinquencies during the month as a result, according to Black Knight's First Look report for December 2017.
The severe delinquency percentage in Florida was over 4% last month, while in Mississippi it was closer to 3%. Both states had severe delinquency rates above 3%, but below 4% in November 2017.
A total of 726,000 properties were 90 or more days past due, but not yet in foreclosure, last month. Of those, 142,000 are attributed to damage from Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. That raises the percentage of severely delinquent loans attributed to the two storms to almost 20% from less than 13% the previous month.
Overall, severe delinquencies were up by 60,000 from November 2017 and 44,000 from December 2016 due to a combination of hurricane-related fallout and seasonal factors.
Shorter-term delinquencies of 30 days or more also were up in December 2017, rising 88,000 from the previous month and 164,000 from the previous year to 2,412,000. This is a high not seen since early 2016 and represents the fourth consecutive month in which the 30-day delinquency rate increased.
Foreclosure starts, in contrast, fell to a post-recession low of 44,500 last month and loans in active foreclosure dropped 32% from a year ago to 152,000.
The prepayment rate last month dropped more than 5% from November 2017 and more than 31% from December 2016 to 0.93%.
