US foreclosure filings hit 5-year low in September

[No Elephants]

I don't get this. After the settlement letting the banks off the hook for all their mortgage errors, I've been waiting for foreclosures to increase, not decrease. Yet, they hit a five-year low--and just in time for a headline like this to hit less than a month before a Presidential election?

Oct 11, 12:18 AM EDT

US foreclosure filings hit 5-year low in September

<snip>


On a national level, overall foreclosure filings last month - including home repossessions - fell 7 percent from August and 16 percent from September 2011. There were 180,427 foreclosure filings reported for September, the fewest since July 2007 in the midst the housing market bust.

The number of homes entering the foreclosure process, so-called foreclosure starts, fell to 87,066 in September, down 12 percent from August and 15 percent from a year earlier. It was the second-straight month of declines following three months of increases, Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac reported.

Foreclosure starts since peaked in April 2009 at around 203,000. But the current level is still well above the 34,000 starts recorded in May 2005, before the collapse of the housing market.

<snip>

Foreclosure activity has been declining in most non-judicial states because they didn't build a huge backlog of pending cases during an industrywide slowdown in foreclosures last year. The slowdown stemmed from widespread claims that lenders had been processing foreclosures without verifying documents.

Of the 19 states in which foreclosure starts rose in September, those with the largest annual increases were New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Washington state and Florida. Except for Washington, they are judicial states, where the courts must sign off on foreclosures.

The slower process in states where courts play a role in foreclosures contributed to a logjam of pending foreclosure cases that now has mortgage lenders catching up.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_FORECLOSURE_RATES?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-10-11-00-18-16


Should your state be a "judicial" state? All of them used to be. Used to be damned hard to foreclose on someone's home. And, all you got if you foreclosed was the real estate, no ability to go after the borrower personally for any deficiency.

[Enthusiast]

1. Doesn't it appear that bankruptcy laws

were changed in anticipation of the crash?

You say, "Should your state be a "judicial" state? All of them used to be. Used to be damned hard to foreclose on someone's home. And, all you got if you foreclosed was the real estate, no ability to go after the borrower personally for any deficiency."

I have heard that several Republicans advocate a return to debtor's prison.