Foreclosure Filings Fall Amid Rising Home Prices

Across the nation foreclosure filings have dropped 15 percent in August from last year’s levels, according to a RealtyTrac report, though recording a one percent increase from July.

This overall decrease in foreclosure filings has largely been due to increasing home prices. Home owners, including banks, are holding on to their properties in the hope of getting a better price.

For instance, in Ventura County where foreclosure filings in August plunged 19 percent from July "with rising prices, the potential home sellers, including banks, are reluctant to put the properties on the market because they can get higher prices by waiting," CSU Channel Islands economist Sung Won Sohn told the Ventura County Star.

The county had 859 total foreclosure filings in August, down 34 percent from August 2011, among which 308 were default notices, 380 auction sales and 171 bank repossessions.

On the price front, the median home price has increased from $360,000 last year to $361,250 this year, the Ventura County Star reports quoting data from the DataQuick real estate information service provider.

"I think the trend is pretty clear," Sohn said. "The real estate market will improve and foreclosure activities will go down. That's the bottom line."

However, among metros that were hardest hit in the foreclosure crisis, California still had the highest foreclosure filings with Modesto recording 1046 in August – a 14 percent increase from July. However, the rate is 23 percent down from the same time last year.

On the national level, foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 193,508 properties in August, which means that one in every 681 U.S. housing units filed for foreclosure during the month.

“Bucking the national trend, deferred foreclosure activity boiled over in several states in August,” Daren Blomquist, vice -president of RealtyTrac said in a statement.

“In judicial states such as Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and New York, this was a continuation of a trend we’ve been seeing for several months now. The increases in Florida and Illinois pushed foreclosure rates in those states to the two highest in the country — supplanting the non-judicial states of Arizona, California, Georgia and Nevada.

“Previous to August, the nation’s top two state foreclosure rates have been from those four non-judicial states every month since December 2010,” he said.