Last year saw a decline in the rate of seriously delinquent home loans and a reduction in the number of completed foreclosures. In addition, mortgage servicers are managing to speed up the time it takes to resolve distressed assets.
Residential delinquency of at least 90 days finished last year at 7.3 percent.
Delinquency deteriorated from 7.2 percent at the end of November.
The statistics were reported Wednesday by CoreLogic, which claims to have data on around 85 percent of all U.S. foreclosures.
But the rate of late payments improved from 7.8 percent as of Dec. 31, 2010.
The CreditForecast.com Household Credit Report released last month by Moody’s Analytics and Equifax also indicated a year-over-year improvement, with 90-day delinquency falling to 6.58 percent as of the end of last year from 7.36 percent at the end of 2010.
The highest delinquency rate in CoreLogic’s report was Florida’s 17.4 percent. In Nevada, delinquency was 13.4 percent, while it was 10.6 percent in New Jersey.
All other states were under 10 percent.
CoreLogic reported that mortgage servicers completed 830,000 foreclosures last year.
Repossessions totaled 1.1 million in 2010.
Another report from RealtyTrac indicated that completed foreclosures edged up to 1,070,603 last year from the prior year’s 1,050,545.
CoreLogic said that around 1.4 million loans were in foreclosure as of Dec. 31, 2011, a decline of 8.4 percent from one year earlier.
Approximately 3.4 percent of all financed homes in the country were in foreclosure as of year-end 2011. Around two-thirds of U.S. homes have a mortgage.
Lenders Processing Service previously reported that the foreclosure rate fell to 4.11 percent at the end of last year from 4.15 percent as of Dec. 31, 2010.
Florida had the highest foreclosure inventory rate in the CoreLogic report at 11.9 percent, followed by New Jersey’s 6.4 percent, Illinois’ 5.4 percent and Nevada’s 5.3 percent. New York rounded out the five-worst states at 4.6 percent.
Wyoming had the lowest foreclosure rate: 0.7 percent.
Servicers improved the rate at which they processed their distressed assets, with the distressed clearing ratio climbing to 1.03 from November’s 0.94.
“The inventory of foreclosed properties has begun to shrink, and the pace at which properties are entering foreclosure is slowing,” CoreLogic Chief Economist Mark Fleming explained in the report. “While foreclosure filings are being curtailed by a variety of judicial and regulatory constraints, mortgage servicers are completing REO sales faster than they are completing foreclosures.”
