Foreclosure filing rate drops 8 percent in 2018

Foreclosure filings dropped 8 percent across the country in 2018, compared to 2017.

ATTOM Data Solutions found that foreclosures in 2018 were down 78 percent from its peak in 2010, when close to 2.9 million homes went into foreclosure, or 2.23 percent of all properties. 2018 had the lowest number of foreclosures since 2005. Last year, 624,753 properties went into foreclosure, making up 0.47 percent of all U.S. housing units. In 2017, 0.51 properties went into foreclosure.

December 2018 also marked a decline month-to-month of 2 percent and 19 percent year-to-year, marking the sixth consecutive month that foreclosures have gone down year-to-year.

“Plummeting foreclosure completions combined with consistently falling foreclosure timelines in 2018 provide evidence that most of the distress from the last housing crisis has now been cleaned up,” said Todd Teta, ATTOM Data Solutions chief product officer. “But there was also some evidence of distress gradually returning to the housing market in 2018, with foreclosure starts increasing from the previous year in more than one-third of all state and local housing markets.

Through foreclosure, lenders repossessed 230,305 properties last year, a decrease of 21 percent from 2017, and down 78 percent from the peak in 2010, when lenders repossessed 1,050,500.

Philadelphia had one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the U.S. for cities with at least 200,000 residents, with 1.06 percent last year. Both York and Dauphin counties were named for having two of the longest waiting periods for foreclosure in the fourth quarter of 2018. York County’s wait, was 2,432 days on average, while Dauphin County’s was 2,054 days. Overall, the average was 811 days in 2018, down 21 percent from 2017.