Delinquencies are increasing, and will likely continue to do so, because high unemployment means plenty of people don’t have jobs to generate paychecks to make mortgage payments, local observers of the real estate market said Thursday, July 15.
“When jobs begin to increase, that’s when we’ll see improvement,” said Scott Kichline , a Realtor with Exit Realty Partners who buys and sell foreclosed homes and manages those properties for banks.
Recent reports on foreclosure totals indicate that banks which had been holding onto foreclosed properties, in hopes of selling them at reduced prices, are allowing more of them to go through the full foreclosure process, Kichline said.
Alternatives such as short sales, in which the mortgage lender agrees to accept a payoff that is less than the balance owed on the loan, are better than foreclosures which can typically cost a lender $50,000 to $70,000, said James Durham, a University of Dayton law professor who teaches real estate finance.
Between January and June, the number of households hit by default and auction sales notices or seized by a lender through foreclosure in Greene, Miami, Montgomery and Warren counties grew, according to the Irvine, Calif.-based real estate data firm.
These totals do not equate to the number of new foreclosure lawsuits filed or of homes taken back by lenders.
In Montgomery County, 3,984 properties — one in every 64 households — received filings in the first six months of the year, RealtyTrac said. A year ago, the company found that foreclosure actions were reported on 3,628 properties.
Greene County properties with filings against them reached 570, versus 530 a year ago, up 7.6 percent.
Properties in Warren County with filings against them grew to 1,071, a 10.7 percent jump over first half 2009’s total of 973 properties. Miami County’s total reached 460, compared with 395 a year ago, a 16.5 percent increase.
In Preble County, total properties faced with a foreclosure filing of some kind was 154, a 6 percent decline.
Nationwide, 1.7 million properties received foreclosure filings of some kind during the first half of this year, an 8 percent jump over a year ago. Total filings between the last half of 2009 and the first half of this year dropped 5 percent, RealtyTrac said.