The first month of 2012 was a good month for homeowners, with fewer borrowers falling behind on their payments. A reduction in the rate of newly delinquent borrowers more than offset a bump in the foreclosure rate.
Residential delinquency was down for the second consecutive month in January. The 30-day rate, including foreclosures, came in at 12.12 percent.
The rate improved from 12.26 percent in December, a month when delinquency slipped 5 BPS.
Previous data from Lender Processing Services Inc., which reported January statistics Tuesday, indicate that last month’s late payments sank from 13.06 a year earlier.
LPS, which claims that half of all U.S. home loans are serviced using its platform, says it extrapolated the figures from its applied analytics loan-level database.
Last month’s performance was worst in the states of Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey and Illinois.
The lowest level of late payments was in the states of Montana, Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota and North Dakota.
There were 3,998,000 people who were past-due during January and another 2,084,000 who were in the process of foreclosure. In December, those numbers respectively were 4,101,000 and 2,066,000.
That put the 30-day rate, excluding foreclosures, at 7.97 percent, falling from December’s 8.15 percent and 8.90 percent in the same month during 2011.
LPS reported that the foreclosure rate ascended to 4.15 percent in January from 4.11 percent. In January 2011, foreclosures weren’t much different at 4.16 percent.
