The report card for last year is in, and mortgage servicers raised their grades across the board. Serious delinquency declined, the foreclosure rate moved lower and the number of repossessions was whittled down.
The rate of U.S. home loans that were at least 90 days past due finished December at 5.0 percent, CoreLogic Inc. reported Wednesday.
The serious delinquency rate didn’t budge from the previous month.
However, 90-day delinquency did improve from the same month in 2012, when the rate was 6.4 percent.
Last month’s 90-day delinquency rate was highest in Florida: 11.2 percent. New Jersey followed with a 10.5 percent rate.
Next was 7.9 percent in New York, 7.5 percent in Nevada and 7.0 percent in Maryland.
With a 90-day rate of just 1.2 percent, North Dakota had the lowest level of delinquency in the nation.
The U.S. delinquency rate included a foreclosure inventory rate of 2.1 percent, off from around 2.2 percent a month earlier. CoreLogic originally reported the November rate at 2.1 percent.
The foreclosure rate was also better than 3.0 percent a year earlier. The Dec. 31, 2012, foreclosure inventory rate was revised up from 2.9 percent originally reported.
The foreclosure rate reflected around 837,000 U.S. homes that were in some stage of foreclosure. The inventory has diminished compared to 1.2 million at the end of 2012.
“The foreclosure inventory fell by more than 30 percent in December on a year-over-year basis, twice the decline from a year ago,” CoreLogic Chief Economist Mark Fleming said in the report. “The decline indicates that the distressed foreclosure inventory is healing at an accelerating rate heading into 2014.”
Florida also had the worst foreclosure inventory rate at 6.7 percent, while New Jersey was also the runner up with its 6.5 percent rate and New York was also No. 3 at 4.9 percent.
Both Connecticut and Maine had a 3.6 percent foreclosure rate, and No. 5 Hawaii’s foreclosure inventory rate was 3.4 percent.
All of the five-worst foreclosure states require judicial foreclosures.
Wyoming, with a foreclosure rate of just 0.4 percent, had the lowest rate in the country. Wyoming is a non-judicial foreclosure state.
CoreLogic said that 45,000 U.S. foreclosures were completed during the final month of 2013, lower than the 47,000 repossessions in November. The November number was revised up from 46,000 originally reported.
In December 2012, there were 52,000 real-estate-owned filings made. The year-earlier figure was revised down from 56,000 previously reported.
During all of last year, 620,111 foreclosures were completed, sinking from 820,498 in 2012. CoreLogic originally reported the prior year’s completed foreclosures at 767,000.
“Since the financial crisis began in September 2008, there have been approximately 4.8 million completed foreclosures across the country,” the report said. “As a basis of comparison, prior to the decline in the housing market in 2007, completed foreclosures averaged 21,000 per month nationwide between 2000 and 2006.”
