Quarterly single-family mortgage delinquency, including on government loans, has improved, and the foreclosure rate is the lowest in a decade.
Including foreclosures, the 30-day rate of past-due payments on single-family mortgages concluded the first quarter of this year
at 6.10 percent.
Delinquency declined compared to the final quarter of last year, when 6.33 percent of all home loans were past due or in the foreclosure inventory.
An even bigger improvement was made versus the first quarter of last year, when the non-current rate was
6.51 percent.
The Mortgage Bankers Association provided the data to Mortgage Daily in its National Delinquency Survey Q1 2017.
At 10.51 percent, loans in New Jersey had the highest non-current rate as of the first-quarter 2017. Next was New York’s 8.99 percent, then Mississippi’s 8.61 percent and Louisiana’s 8.36 percent.
Colorado had the lowest non-current rate: 2.65 percent.
U.S. mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration had a non-current rate of 10.06 percent, a stark improvement from 11.14 percent as of year-end 2016.
Department of Veterans Affairs-guaranteed loans closed out April 2017 at 4.93 percent, sinking from 5.11 percent as of Dec. 31, 2016.
“Employment growth started 2017 on strong footing, with the economy adding 216,000 jobs in January 2017 and 232,000 jobs in February,” MBA Vice President of Industry Analysis Marina Walsh said in an accompanying news release. “Average hourly wage growth increased 2.8 percent over the year, and has maintained a generally increasing trend since late 2015. These fundamentals have helped to support the performance of all loan types — whether FHA, VA or conventional loans.”
As of March 31, 2017, the non-current rate on all loan types included a 4.71 percent 30-day rate excluding foreclosures.
The other component of the non-current rate was a 1.39 percent foreclosure rate, “the lowest foreclosure inventory rate since the first quarter of 2007,” the trade group said.
Walsh noted, “nearly all states had a decrease in the percentage of loans in foreclosure in the first quarter.”
Foreclosures initiated accelerated.
“We saw an increase in foreclosure starts for the first time since the fourth quarter of 2014, but this increase was accompanied by a sizable drop in loans that were 90 days or more past due,” Walsh explained. “It is likely that legacy distressed loans were held in the late stage-delinquency bucket by factors such as resolution attempts and state-specific requirements, before eventually going into foreclosure status.”
