RealtyTrac came out with their mid-year foreclosure activity report yesterday and, despite what you read in the headlines, Chicago didn’t really change that much. Total activity was down about 2% from May, which is not significant at all, and it’s certainly lower than it was 2 – 3 years ago. However, it is still higher than most of 2011. It’s all in the graph below.
According to Brandon Moore, CEO of RealtyTrac:
Additional scrutiny on how lenders and servicers process foreclosures, along with aggressive foreclosure prevention efforts by the federal government and several state governments, continue to keep a lid on the foreclosure problem at a national level. Still, foreclosure starts began boiling over in more markets in the first half of the year, particularly in the second quarter…Lenders and servicers are slowly but surely catching up with the backlog of delinquent loans that under normal circumstances would have started the foreclosure process last year, and that catching up is why the average time to complete the foreclosure process started to level off or decrease in some states in the second quarter. The increases in foreclosure starts in the first half of the year will likely translate into more short sales and bank repossessions in the second half of the year and into next year.