Serious delinquencies and foreclosures continue to drop, hitting near decade lows in February, according to the Loan Performance Insights Report from CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled solutions provider.
Mortgages delinquent by 30 days or more, including those in foreclosures, made up 5% of the market share in February, a decrease of 0.5 percentage points from the year before, according to the report.
“Serious delinquency and foreclosure rates continue to drift lower, and are at their lowest levels since the fourth quarter of 2007,” CoreLogic chief economist Frank Nothaft said. “Moreover, the past-due share dropped to 5%, the lowest since September 2007.”
“However, current-to-30-day past-due transition rates ticked up in February, and 30-day to 60-day delinquency rates held mostly steady, recording only a 0.06% increase,” Nothaft said.
The foreclosure inventory rate, which measures the share of mortgages in some stage of the foreclosure process, sank to 0.8%, down from 1.1% in February 2016. Serious delinquency rates, 90 days or more past due including loans in foreclosure, also declined to 2.2% in February, down from 2.8% last year.
Early stage delinquencies, defined as those 30-59 days past due, increased in February to 2.14%, up from 2.08% last year. The share of mortgages 60 to 89 days past due held steady at 0.7% in February.
“While national-level delinquency rates declined, the serious delinquency rate remained elevated in many mid-Atlantic and northeast states led by New York and New Jersey,” CoreLogic President and CEO Frank Martell said.
“February-to-February increases in both 30-day or more delinquency rates and in serious delinquency rates were also observed in Alaska, Louisiana and Wyoming relating to the impact of the downturn in the global oil market,” Martell said.
