You may have seen articles yesterday with headlines like “Chicago Foreclosures Rose In July” but you need to really see the underlying data to really understand what is going on. RealtyTrac released their July foreclosure activity report yesterday and what it shows for Chicago is a 21% increase over last year. However, with trend data like this that doesn’t show seasonal patterns there is little point in making year over year comparisons.
Look at the graph below and you’ll see that in fact activity was down for the second month in a row, with July down 14% from June. You should also note that we are running well below the levels seen in 2009/ 2010. And if you look at the last 12 months there is sort of a slight upward trend but the last 6 months is actually in a bit of a decline. So I think it’s a stretch to say that activity increased in July.
