Foreclosure activity remained high in May, but is still down year-over-year when comparing last month to the same period a year earlier, CoreLogic (CLGX) said.
From April to May, completed foreclosures increased to 63,000 from a revised 62,000 while still falling from 77,000 in the year-ago period.
There have been 3.6 million completed foreclosures since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008, but the pace of foreclosures is slowing.
“There were more than 819,000 completed foreclosures over the past year, or an average of 2,440 completed foreclosures every day over the last 12 months,” said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. “Although the level of completed foreclosures remains high, it is down 27% from a peak of 1.1 million in all of 2010.”
The national foreclosure inventory hit 1.4 million last month — representing 3.4% of all homes with a mortgage — down from 1.5 million last year but unchanged from April.
At the state level, foreclosure-riddled states like Nevada, Arizona and Michigan are starting to see dramatic declines. The three states saw at least 20% declines in their May foreclosure inventories from the year-ago period.
While foreclosure inventories are dropping in many states, they also are rising in judicial foreclosure states such as Hawaii, New York and Connecticut.
States with the most completed foreclosures for the 12 months ending in May 2012 were California (with 133,000 completed foreclosures); Florida (92,000); Michigan (60,000); Texas (58,000) and Georgia (57,000). Those five states account for 48.8% of all completed foreclosures nationally.
States with the lowest number of completed foreclosures include South Dakota, District of Columbia, North Dakota, West Virginia and Hawaii.
The states with the highest foreclosure inventories as a percentage of all mortgaged homes are Florida, New Jersey, Illinois, New York and Nevada.
