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NYC sees March foreclosure uptick
Nearly 5,000 New York City homes were hit with foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2010, up 1.51 percent from the quarter before and 16.21 percent over the first quarter of 2009, according to national real estate foreclosure tracking company RealtyTrac, which released its monthly market report today (see the full report below).
Worst in the city in terms of its foreclosure rate was Staten Island, where 631 households, or one in 284, received notice of some stage of the foreclosure process — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — during the quarter. That rate won the borough a fourth-place ranking among counties in the state for the three-month period. By sheer numbers, foreclosure filings on Staten Island dropped 1.71 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 and were up 26.2 percent over the same period last year.
Queens, whose South Jamaica neighborhood was recently pegged as the worst in the nation for mortgage fraud by First American CoreLogic for the period between 2004 and 2009, was hit with 1,694 foreclosure filings during the first quarter, up 1.93 percent from the quarter before and down 3.09 percent from the same period last year. That works out to one in every 496 homes for a ninth-place ranking in the state.
Brooklyn, ranked 11th in terms of its foreclosure rate, saw 1,737 foreclosure filings, or one per 557 homes during the quarter, up 6.56 percent from the quarter earlier and 51.04 percent over the first quarter of 2009. The Bronx, ranked 16th, and barely-touched Manhattan, ranked 44th, saw 642 and 200 filings, respectively. Filings in the Bronx dipped 6.55 percent quarter-over-quarter and rose 10.69 percent year-over-year, while Manhattan foreclosure filings dropped 4.76 percent since December 2009 and 17.36 percent since last year at this time.
The city’s numbers echoed the nationwide trend, in which foreclosures rose 7 percent from the quarter before and 16 percent from the same period last year. There were 932,234 U.S. homes hit with foreclosure filings during January, February and March, a rate of one in every 138 households. March alone brought notices to 367,056 properties — the highest monthly total since January 2005, when RealtyTrac issued its first ever monthly report.
“Foreclosure activity in the first quarter of 2010 followed a very similar pattern to what we saw in the first quarter of 2009: a shallow trough in January and February followed by a substantial spike in March,” RealtyTrac CEO James Saccacio said in a statement.
This year, though, the foreclosure spike could be a sign of more to come.
“The increases were more tilted toward the final state of foreclosure,” Saccacio said. “[That] may be further evidence that lenders are starting to make a dent in the backlog of distressed inventory that has built up over the last year as foreclosure prevention programs and processing delays slowed down the normal foreclosure timeline.”