The rate of past-due payments on residential loans continued to fall — down for the fourth month in a row. A decline in performing loans again drove the improvement, as foreclosure activity was mixed.
Delinquency of at least one month on home loans was 11.23 percent during March.
The 30-day rate fell from 11.70 percent in February.
Late payments have fallen each month since November 2011, when 12.31 percent of all mortgages were either past due at least 30 days or in the process of foreclosure.
Lender Processing Services Inc., which derived the metrics from its loan-level database of 40 million loans, previously reported that the delinquency rate was 11.99 percent in March 2011.
Last month’s rate excluding foreclosures was 7.09 percent, dropping from 7.57 percent a month earlier. The 48-basis-point decline exceeded February’s improvement of 42 BPS.
The number of delinquent loans was 3,531,000, fewer than the 3,781,000 past-due loans in February.
The states with the highest level of delinquency were Florida, Mississippi, Nevada, New Jersey and Illinois. This has been the ranking for multiple months now.
The lowest delinquency rates were in the states of Montana, Alaska, South Dakota, Wyoming and North Dakota.
The March foreclosure rate was 4.14 percent, inching up from the previous month’s 4.13 percent. But the number of loans in foreclosure drifted down to 2,060,000 from 2,065,000.
