Out of 30 major metropolitan areas, mortgage performance in just four has improved since the mortgage market collapse began. The Motor City outperformed all of its rivals.
Delinquency of at least 60 days on U.S. home loans deteriorated 25 percent between 2007 and 2011, Experian reported Friday.
The starting point, 2007, was a year that saw 156 mortgage business closings or failures tracked by the Mortgage Graveyard. That was more non-bank casualties than any year since tracking began in 1998. Just 22 closings were reported for 2006.
More than 88,800 real estate finance jobs were wiped out during 2007, based on data tracked by Mortgage Daily. The monstrous mass exodus from mortgage employment was the most of any year tracked by MortgageDaily.com and dwarfed the prior year’s loss of less than 3,000 jobs.
Weighing on the delinquency deterioration was Portland, Ore., where people who missed their mortgage payments doubled during the covered period. It was the worst performance among the 30 biggest Metropolitan Statistical Areas analyzed.
The story wasn’t much better in Phoenix, where late payments propelled 78 percent.
No. 3 Baltimore saw a more than two-thirds jump, followed by Seattle’s 65 percent rise and New York’s nearly one-half increase.
But four MSAs have actually improved since the mortgage meltdown materialized.
The best-performing city was Detroit. The change in missed mortgage payments in Detroit was 17 percent lower in 2011 than in 2007.
Denver also saw a decline in delinquent borrowers, with 7 percent fewer borrowers being late.
Minneapolis improved 6 percent, and Cleveland was 4 percent better.
