Foreclosure rate declines 

Posted: 12:01 am Thu, November 12, 2009
By Robbie Whelan
Daily Record Business Writer

A summer rise in foreclosures in Maryland appears to have tapered off, as numbers released Thursday show the first decline in month-to-month filings since June.

There were 6,661 foreclosure filings in the state in October, down 1.33 percent from September, but still a 124 percent increase over October 2008, giving Maryland the ninth-worst foreclosure rate in the country, according to Irvine, Calif.-based research company RealtyTrac Inc. The state had the country’s 10th worst rate in September

Maryland trends appear to be trailing a general decline in filings across the country as a whole. The national foreclosure rate was down 3.3 percent in October compared to September, but still up 18.9 percent compared to last year. October was the third month in a row that the national foreclosure rate has dipped.

“Three consecutive monthly declines is unprecedented for our report, and on first blush an indication that the foreclosure tide may be turning,” James J. Saccacio, RealtyTrac’s CEO, said in a statement. “However, the fundamental forces driving foreclosure activity in this housing downturn — high-risk mortgages, negative equity, and unemployment — continue to loom over any nascent recovery.”

Statewide, one in 348 houses was in some stage of the foreclosure process. Nationally, that figure was one out of every 385 homes. Maryland’s foreclosure rate hasn’t beaten the national average since August.

Maryland’s more foreclosure-battered jurisdictions,  however, are in much better shape than the nation’s hardest-hit areas.

In Baltimore, one of the state’s worst victims of the foreclosure crisis in the last year, foreclosures climbed 10 percent over last month, and despite curbing a major jump in year-over-year foreclosure rate in August, filings were still more than 207 percent higher than in October 2008. One in every 293 homes in the city is in foreclosure.

Las Vegas, a city whose rapid population growth during the housing boom provided plenty of fuel for the foreclosure fire, remains the city with the worst foreclosure rate in the country, with on in 68 homes in distress, nearly five times worse than the national average.

In Maryland, Prince George’s County once again led the state with 2,004 filings, more than twice as many as Baltimore City, the next-highest jurisdiction. About one in 157 homes in Prince George’s County is in some stage of foreclosure.

In Baltimore, the escalation in filings may have to do with widespread speculative buying during stronger economic times, according to Richard Clinch, director of economic research for the Jacob France Institute at the University of Baltimore. The Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, a program of the France Institute, is tracking foreclosure data for the city.

“In the city you have a lot of speculative buying. A lot of people bet on the city’s recovery, because the city had a lot of distressed properties and a lot of development going on,” he said. “So the speculators are being hit by this. Speculative buyers who didn’t get to flip their house. Speculative buyers who can’t keep renters because they lost their jobs. … Either the payments stopped coming in or the assets no longer looks valuable. And that’s hard to tease out of the numbers.”