Serious home loan delinquency and foreclosures continued to improve on a year-over-year basis. But there was a month-over-month up tick in completed foreclosures.
Residential loans that were delinquent at least 90 days accounted for 4.4 percent of all mortgages in May, CoreLogic Inc. reported.
The seriously past-due rate declined from the prior month, when it was 4.5 percent.
An even bigger improvement was made compared to the same month during 2013, when 90-day delinquency was 5.6 percent.
Florida’s 9.6 percent serious delinquency rate was higher than any other state, though New Jersey was close behind at 9.5 percent. After that was 7.5 percent in New York and 6.3 percent in both Maryland and Nevada.
A 1.1 percent serious delinquency rate in North Dakota was the most favorable in the country.
The number of U.S. home loans in some stage of foreclosure was 660,000, falling from 693,000 in April. During May 2013, the count was 1 million.
It was the 31st consecutive year-over-year decline for the foreclosure inventory.
That put the foreclosure rate at 1.7 percent, 10 basis points lower than the previous month and a 90-basis-point improvement from the same month last year.
The May foreclosure inventory rate was 5.8 percent in New Jersey — the worst in the nation. Florida’s 5.2 percent followed, then New York’s 4.3 percent, Hawaii’s 3.1 percent and Maine’s 2.8 percent.
Alaska had a lower foreclosure rate than any other state: 0.3 percent.
Mortgage servicers completed 47,000 foreclosures in May, slightly more than the 45,000 repossessions a month earlier.
But real-estate-owned filings fell from 52,000 a year earlier.
Still, despite the decline, the pace of foreclosures remains elevated well above the roughly 21,000 monthly average between 2000 and 2006.
During the first five months of 2014, completed foreclosures amounted to 222,000.
