US foreclosures hit a nearly eight-year low

Kenneth Rosen
Kenneth Rosen

U.S. foreclosure filings fell last month to their lowest point since late 2005, according to data from RealtyTrac.

The number of foreclosure starts across the country dropped to 52,826, a decline of 32 percent from November 2012. More than 113,000 properties were hit with default, auction or repossession notices across the U.S. in November. That is a 15 percent decline month-over-month and the largest monthly drop since 2010. Real estate experts are optimistic that this represents the fading housing crisis in its final gasps.

“In another year, it will all be done,” Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics at the University of California in Berkeley, told Bloomberg News.

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Indeed, foreclosure filings were down year-over-year in all of the 20 biggest cities except Baltimore, Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. In Baltimore, for example, foreclosure filings actually saw a 46 percent increase. The process of homes coming to market in New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Washington, D.C., is particularly slow because of court oversight of repossessions.

The latest S&P/Case-Shiller index showed that September’s home prices in the 20 largest U.S. cities saw their biggest jump since February 2006, as previously reported. [Bloomberg News]Mark Maurer