2008: The Year of Foreclosures

Record foreclosures are not surprising but still depressing. And the RealtyTrac has compiled a list of numbers for 2008 - the numbers are grim. In an article from Bloomberg titled Foreclosures in U.S. Rose 81%, Topping 2.3 Million Last Year the bad news blares from the headlines. Lets take a look at the text -

U.S. foreclosure filings jumped 81 percent last year as falling house prices, tighter mortgage lending and the longest recession in a quarter century battered property owners, RealtyTrac Inc. said.

More than 2.3 million properties got a default or auction notice, or were seized by lenders, the Irvine, California-based seller of default data said today. That’s the most RealtyTrac has documented in four years of recordkeeping. Filings rose 41 percent in December from a year earlier to 303,410.

The nation lost more than 2.6 million jobs last year, the most since 1945, and U.S. stocks had their worst performance since the Great Depression. President-elect Barack Obama has said the country needs to prevent foreclosures to revive the housing market and economy.

“If we don’t adopt a comprehensive national policy, we’ll have 5 million to 8 million new foreclosures in the next three years,” Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview. “The single most important thing is making credit available for the average person.”

...

“I think it will get substantially worse,” Novak-Smith, of the RE/MAX Results brokerage, said in an interview. “You’ve got people losing jobs right and left and the general business climate is bad. We’ve got an economy built on easy credit, and now it’s got to revert.”

And from RealtyTrac for the ten hardest hit states with New Jersey at number 10. The ranking is by % of housing units in foreclosure. Here is the list -

Rate Rank	State Name	Total Foreclosure Filings	Total Properties with Filings	%Change from 2007	%Change from 2006	%Housing Units (foreclosure

1

Nevada

123,989

77,693

125.74

529.50

7.29

2

Florida

501,396

385,309

133.11

411.68

4.52

3

Arizona

152,621

116,911

203.13

655.04

4.49

4

California

837,665

523,624

109.86

497.91

3.97

5

Colorado

66,795

50,396

27.90

61.41

2.41

6

Michigan

145,365

106,058

21.61

107.89

2.35

7

Ohio

146,099

113,570

26.22

155.40

2.25

8

Georgia

116,225

85,254

44.36

117.07

2.20

9

Illinois

115,063

99,488

54.70

126.01

1.91

10

New Jersey

69,612

62,514

101.20

186.84

1.80