Nearly one in five homes for sale in the United States are properties repossessed by lenders, data aggregator RealtyTrac reported today, as foreclosure-related filings rose 8 percent from June to July, and 55 percent from a year ago.
Foreclosure-related filings — which include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions — rose to 272,171 in July, or one filing for every 464 U.S. homes.
Although not all homes subjected to foreclosure filings are ultimately repossessed by lenders, bank repossessions were the fastest-growing segment of foreclosure filings, growing 184 percent from a year ago, to 77,295.
RealtyTrac said it now has more than 750,000 properties in its active real-estate-owned database, which represents 17 percent of the inventory of existing homes for sale in June, as reported by the National Association of Realtors.
The rate of foreclosure-related filings was highest in Nevada, California and Florida. In Nevada, one in every 106 households subject to some type of filing during July — a 15 percent increase from June and up 97 percent from a year ago. One third of the state’s 10,060 foreclosure-related filings were bank repossessions.
California, Florida and Ohio led the nation in terms of the raw number foreclosure-related filings, with California seeing a 5 percent increase from June to July and an 85 percent increase from a year ago. Of the state’s 72,285 foreclosure-related filings, 23,406 were bank repossessions.
Three of the four metropolitan areas with the highest rate of foreclosure-related filings were in California: Merced, Stockton and Modesto. The Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., area had the highest rate of foreclosure-related filings in the nation — one in 64 households, RealtyTrac said.
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