About 800 Dallas-Fort Worth homes were scheduled for foreclosure in January.
Out of the millions of houses and condos in the area, the few hundred houses facing forced sale are hardly noticeable — unless, of course, you live in one of them.
During the housing downturn in 2010, North Texas was getting almost 6,000 home foreclosure filings a month. That year, almost 64,000 notices landed on the courthouse steps in Dallas, Collin, Denton and Tarrant counties.
But after the housing market turned the corner and prices began to rise, home foreclosures in the D-FW area quickly fell back to pre-recession levels.
Now, with residential values in the area at all-time highs, home foreclosure rates in the area are near record lows.
But there are signs that the long slide in North Texas home mortgage defaults may be over.
"Dallas was one of the markets where we saw an uptick in foreclosure starts in late 2017," said Daren Blomquist, chief economist for Attom Data Solutions, which gathers mortgage and foreclosure data. "This surprised us. We saw it in Dallas, Denver, Nashville and Austin — great markets that are on fire."
Late-loan levels in North Texas are still so low as to not be something to worry about.
Only 1.4 percent of Dallas-area homeowners with a loan were seriously behind in their payments in CoreLogic's latest nationwide mortgage delinquency report. That's better than the 2 percent of mortgage holders nationwide who are 90 days or more behind.
Home mortgage defaults in southern Texas shot up after last year's hurricane.
"Serious delinquency rates are up sharply in Texas and Florida compared with a year ago," said CoreLogic's top economist, Frank Nothaft.
About 2.5 percent of Texans with home mortgages were seriously in arrears as of November, according to CoreLogic. In the Houston area, it was 4.6 percent.
Credit loosening
Blomquist said most of the home loan default increases he's seen in the Dallas area came from low-down-payment mortgages made in 2014 — about the same time lenders started to ease some of their underwriting standards.
He said home foreclosure rates were abnormally low before the uptick.
"We have in the last few years seen a gradual loosening of credit," Blomquist said. "Some of those loans originated a few years ago are failing at a slightly higher rate than we had previously seen.
"That is almost more of the market rebalancing as opposed to anything like another foreclosure crisis."
Blomquist said he doesn't see the housing speculation and overlending that fueled the home market crash 10 years ago.
"There are definitely home markets that are in bubble territory — I would even put some of the counties in the Dallas area in that territory," he said. "But the bubble is not in danger of popping anytime soon, and it's fueled by real demand and constrained supply.
"Even if you had that demand weaken a little bit, it's not like all of a sudden there is oversupply on the market. The market would maybe correct and not crash."
Creeping up
Curtis Roddy of Dallas' Foreclosure Listing Service said February foreclosure filings in North Texas were up about 10 percent from January of last year.
Last year, 12,109 D-FW area homes were threatened with forced sale by lenders — the lowest total in decades.
"Talking to trustees, we hear it's picking up a little bit," said Roddy, whose firm has tracked North Texas home foreclosures since the 1980s. "We are seeing more loans from 2015 and 2016 getting posted.
"We are even seeing some 2017 home loans getting posted for foreclosure on a statewide basis."
