Residential mortgage foreclosures are up across the country so far this year, new data show.
Foreclosure filings in the first half of the year rose 6 percent from 2024 to about 188,000 filings, according to a report from ATTOM Data. That’s the highest amount since 2019.
ATTOM’s data stems from more than 3,000 counties across the country and focuses on documents related to defaults, auctions and bank-repurchased properties.
Illinois and Delaware tie for the states with the highest foreclosure rate. About 0.2 percent of homes in those states are tied to foreclosed mortgages. South Dakota, Vermont and Montana have the lowest rates in the country.
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Alaska recorded the greatest jump in foreclosure activity year over year. Foreclosure-related filings in that state were up 55 percent. Rhode Island was second, with an increase of 51 percent.
The metropolitan area with the biggest yearly increase was Bellingham, Washington, where filings were up 360 percent. Second place went to Jacksonville, North Carolina, where filings were up by just under 241 percent.
The New York-New Jersey-Jersey City region, the largest metro area in the country, saw filings plunge by about 15 percent annually — about 7 percentage points smaller than the decrease from 2023 to 2024. The foreclosure rate in this area in the first half of the year came in at 0.13 percent.
The foreclosure rate in the Los Angeles metro area was 0.11 percent in the first half of the year, down about 7 percent from the same time last year. But that change is higher than it was from 2023 to 2024, when the rate changed by 5.7 percent year over year.
Nationwide, the number of underwater mortgages — home purchase loans with a higher principal than the home’s market value — is creeping up, signaling that those who purchased houses during the recent peak pandemic years may have seen their homes’ values drop.
While holding such a mortgage doesn’t mean an owner can’t keep up with their payments, it could make it harder to sell their home or refinance the loan.
Economists also don’t expect foreclosures to drastically increase because of the stricter lending standards that were implemented after the 2008 financial crisis.