San Francisco, while it has the distinction of having some of the highest-priced homes in the country, is nothing spectacular when it comes to foreclosures.
Foreclosures will never completely go away. And, some states take longer to get homes through the whole foreclosure process, with about a half-dozen states with 1,000-plus day processes. But California, and especially San Francisco, doesn’t dazzle in foreclosure stats.
San Franciscans seem to be good at hanging onto those high-priced homes.
In the metro, there were only 872 homes at some point in the foreclosure process in January 2016. For the 11th largest metro in the country, that’s pretty impressive.
In new numbers calculated by RealtyTrac, the San Francisco MSA– which consists of San Francisco, Oakland and Haywood– ranked 150th in the nation for foreclosures. Only precious few large metros have a ranking that good.
RealtyTrac comes up with those rankings by dividing the total number of housing units in an area by the number of foreclosures. They do that computation only for metros with a population of 200,000 or more.
RealtyTrac computes a foreclosure rate by dividing the foreclosures into the housing units in a metro. In the San Francisco MSA, Since there is one home in foreclosure for every 1,387 in the metro.
Even though the numbers sound good so far, there are a few numbers that appear to not be so positive. Month-over-month, San Francisco’s foreclosure rate increased by 16.89 percent. A December bump in that stat was seen in a few of big metros. Fellow California large metro Los Angeles saw a jump of 9.1 percent in its foreclosure rate.
San Francisco’s year-over-year foreclosure rate, though, dropped 2.5 percent.
San Francisco, or California for that matter, can’t touch the foreclosure giants of 2015. The highest foreclosure rates were found in New Jersey (1.91 percent of housing units with a foreclosure filing), followed by Florida (1.77 percent) and Maryland (1.6 percent).
By the end of last year, 0.82 percent of all U.S. housing units (one in every 122) had at least one foreclosure filing in 2015, the second consecutive year where the annual foreclosure rate has been below 1 percent of all U.S. housing units.
