Although most of the country is out of the foreclosure woods, there are still little pockets of darkness.
One of those places is Miami.
In new numbers calculated by RealtyTrac, the Miami MSA ranked 22nd in the nation for foreclosures. The company computes that ranking by dividing the total number of housing units in an area by the number of foreclosures. They rank only metros with a population of 200,000 or better on this list.
In terms of a ratio, in Miami, one out of every 808 homes is somewhere in the foreclosure process.
In January, RealtyTrac found there to be 3,063 homes in foreclosure in the Miami metro. That’s a month-over-month dip of 4.06 percent, and a 45.29 percent decline compared with January 2015.
Many factors can play into these rates.
For example, some states have much longer foreclosure processes than others, depending on legal requirements and backlogs. There are six states where the foreclosure process can take more than 1,000 days– Florida is one of them.
But, that means that the early post-crash backlog in The Sunshine State is now finally starting to clear. And, there is naturally some level of foreclosure activity in the housing market.
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Miami foreclosure rates compare with the nation
And, comparing 2014 to 2015, even more states (and DC) showed more foreclosures. Along with DC, 24 states posted an increase in foreclosure activity in 2015 compared to 2014.
Overall, Florida was second on the list of states that had the highest foreclosure rates in 2015. The top was New Jersey (1.91 percent of housing units with a foreclosure filing), followed by Florida (1.77 percent) and then Maryland (1.6 percent).
“In 2015 we saw a return to normal, healthy foreclosure activity in many markets even as banks continued to clean up some of the last vestiges of distress left over from the last housing crisis,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac, in a statement.
“The increase in bank repossessions that we saw for the year was evidence of this cleanup phase, which largely involves completing foreclosure on highly distressed, low-value properties.”
A total of 569,835 U.S. properties started the foreclosure process in 2015, down 11 percent from 2014 and down 73 percent from the peak of more than 2.1 million foreclosure starts in 2009 to a 10-year low.
By the end of 2015, 0.82 percent of all U.S. housing units (one in every 122) had at least one foreclosure filing in 2015, the second consecutive year where the annual foreclosure rate has been below 1 percent of all U.S. housing units.
U.S. foreclosure starts in December were down 30 percent from a year ago — the sixth consecutive month with an annual decrease in foreclosure starts — while U.S. bank REOs in December increased 65 percent from a year ago.
That makes the 10th consecutive month with an annual increase in REOs.
So while Florida’s not completely out of the woods yet, the next few steps will be easier than the last few.
