Mortgage delinquency has fallen more than 40 basis points over the past year and improved each of the past three quarters. The forecast is for another 10-basis-point decline before the year is out.
The rate of residential borrowers who were at least 60 days past due finished the third quarter at 5.41 percent.
Delinquency dropped from 5.49 as of June 30. The rate has improved each quarter since the fourth-quarter 2011, when 60-day delinquency was 6.01 percent.
TransUnion, which reported the statistics, said that the rate of late payments was 5.88 percent as of Sept. 30, 2011.
The findings were harvested from a database of 27 million anonymous, randomly sampled consumer records.
Despite the improvement, TransUnion Vice President Tim Martin warned in the report that normal delinquency conditions are a long way off.
Still, TransUnion predicted a slight decline in fourth-quarter delinquency.
“We saw some improvement in the housing market in the third quarter with regard to house prices, home sales and increased refinance activity, and we believe we will start to see these numbers reflected in improved mortgage delinquency next quarter,” Martin said. “As such, we forecast the year-end delinquency rate to improve to something in the 5.25%-5.35% range.”
Florida’s 13.09 percent delinquency rate was the highest of any state. But the Sunshine State improved from 13.48 percent in the second quarter.
No. 2 was Nevada, where delinquency worsened to 10.93 percent from 10.85 percent.
New Jersey followed, with the rate climbing to 8.33 percent from the second quarter’s 8.15 percent, then Maryland, where delinquency climbed to 6.86 percent from 6.79 percent.
North Dakota’s 1.44 percent 60-day delinquency rate was the lowest of any state.
“Arizona and California, two of the states most negatively impacted by the mortgage crisis, experienced the greatest improvement in mortgage delinquency rates on a year-over-year basis,” the report stated. “Since the third quarter of 2011, Arizona’s has dropped nearly 25 percent from 7.46 percent to 5.62 percent. California has dropped almost 24 percent in that same time, from 7.29 percent to 5.56 percent.”
TransUnion found that less than half of the metropolitan statistical areas had a decline in third-quarter delinquency. In the prior two quarters, around 75 percent of MSAs saw an improvement.
