Foreclosure Inventories Continue to Fall – Down 35% Year Over Year

CoreLogic published its monthly National Foreclosure Report with data from June 2014, which indicates that foreclosure inventory is down 35 percent from June last year. Foreclosures fell from 54,000 to 49,000 on a year-over-year basis.
The report further indicated that foreclosure inventory in the United States shrank for 17 consecutive months as of June 2014 and fell below 650,000 homes by the end of that month, but the month-over-month rate of decline in inventory is not expected to last.
Mark Fleming, the chief economist for CoreLogic, commented that the current state of national foreclosures is not entirely positive, though there are certainly some positive trends: "While 32 straight months of year-over-year decline in the foreclosure rate is cause for celebration, the total number of homes still in the foreclosure process remains almost four times as high as the average in the early 2000s."
There are some concerns that the foreclosure inventory will soon dwindle down to the foreclosures that are the most difficult to complete, namely those in judicial states where the foreclosure processes are complex and lengthy.
States with the greatest inventories were New Jersey, Florida, New York, Hawaii, and Maine, while states with the highest number of completed foreclosures in the year ending in June were Florida, Michigan, Texas, California, and Georgia. The states with high inventory are outliers in the current state of foreclosures, as "Most of the U.S. has reduced its shadow inventory to pre-recession levels," according to Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic.
Completed foreclosures did rise 2.7 percent month-over-month up from 48,000 in May, a number that is still more than double the national average from before the financial crisis. Nationwide, CoreLogic found that 648,000 houses were in a stage of foreclosure as of June 2014, and that 596,554 foreclosures were completed in the twelve months ending this past June. If concerns about lingering foreclosure inventories prove true, it may be several years yet before the national inventory shrinks back to pre-recession levels.