1 Million Homes to Be Repossessed in 2010!
The national foreclosure numbers continue to bounce around a bit, rising here, falling there, but at a very high level.
However, the days of letting troubled homeowners sit in limbo for months or years are long gone.
Banks are moving to seize homes and then unload them on the real estate market. Of course, the timing could not be better, coming just as prices falter and sales plunge with the end of the home buyer tax credit, but that’s a story/rant for another day.
Overall, the pace with which banks are seizing homes is escalating dramatically as we hurtle towards that dubious, 1-million-homes-repossessed milestone.
Bank repossessions jumped 5 percent from the first quarter and are a whopping 38 percent over the second quarter of 2009. The grand tally of 269,062 homes seized set a new quarterly high, RealtyTrac finds.
OK, so how is Massachusetts doing in all this frenzy of foreclosure activity?
Well, not so hot.
It’s easy to fall into the trap of comparing the Bay State with foreclosure disaster zones like Nevada and Arizona. We are not in that league.
But Massachusetts still had nearly 23,000 homes and condos hit with foreclosure filings and actions during the first half of the year. That’s a 24 percent jump from the first half of 2009.
In fact the total number of foreclosure filings in Massachusetts is very close to the numbers seen in New York and Pennsylvania, at more than 24,000 and 27,000 respectively.
Of course, our two fellow Northeastern states are also much larger. Our beloved Bay State, at 6.3 million strong, has less than a third of New York’s population and about half of Pennsylvania’s.
That’s certainly no reason to pat ourselves on the back. Rather, what has gone so wrong here in Massachusetts?
Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment