Foreclosures Sink to Pre-Recession Low

Blomquist says that banks have worked through most of the legacy pipeline of foreclosures.

IRVINE, CA—It appears that the foreclosure crisis that began amid the Great Recession has sputtered to a halt. ATTOM Data Solutions said Thursday that foreclosure filings in September were down 24% from a year ago and 13% from the previous month. The September tally of 82,972 properties in default or scheduled for bank repossession or auction was the lowest since December 2005.

“Foreclosure activity has been on a steady slide downward over the past six years, finally dropping back below pre-crisis levels in September,” says Daren Blomquist, SVP at ATTOM Data Solutions. “While we’ve know that the national foreclosure problem has been dying a long, slow death for quite some time, the final nail in the coffin of the foreclosure crisis is the year-over-year decrease in the average foreclosure timeline nationwide” as seen in the third quarter—“the first time that’s happened since we began tracking foreclosure timelines in Q1 2007.”