Foreclosures slide to lowest level in 11 years

Foreclosure activity in Southwest Florida has dropped to its lowest level in 11 years, back to what analysts consider a normal volume of troubled homeowners.

Filings in the region have plunged 89 percent from their recession-era highs, far from the days when Sarasota-Manatee posted one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.

The Sarasota-Manatee area recorded 2,214 foreclosure filings in 2017, with one in every 184 homes — or 0.54 percent — in some form of distress, according to a new report from real estate database ATTOM Data Solutions.

That is down by 24 percent from 2016 and by 58 percent from 2015, and well off the peak of 20,507 filings in 2009 after the housing bubble burst.

It is also the lowest level of distressed properties since the 2,072 foreclosures in 2006, prior to the start of the financial crisis.

The two-county metro area ranked 78th among the nation’s 217 largest metro areas for foreclosures last year.

Foreclosures filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were down by 39 percent throughout Florida and by 27 percent nationwide over the year.

“Thanks to a housing boom driven primarily by a scarcity of supply, which has helped to limit home purchases to the most highly qualified — and low-risk — borrowers, the U.S. housing market has the luxury of playing a version of foreclosure limbo in which it searches for how low foreclosures can go,” said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM.

“There are a few notable local market exceptions playing a different version of foreclosure limbo in which a backlog of legacy foreclosure activity left over from the last housing crisis is still winding its way through a labyrinthine foreclosure process."

Legacy foreclosures — those originated between 2004 and 2008 — accounted for 55 percent of all distressed properties in Florida, the fifth-highest rate in the nation. The average time to close a foreclosure in Florida was third longest at 1,493 days.

In Charlotte County, foreclosure activity also sank to its lowest mark since 2006. The county reported 622 filings in 2017, down 43 percent over the year and off by 91 percent from the peak of 6,889 in 2010.

One in every 163 Charlotte homes, or 0.61 percent, was in some stage of foreclosure by year end.

Florida totaled 65,149 properties with foreclosure filings last year. That represented a decline of 39 percent from 2016 and 87 percent from the 2009 high.

Despite the improvement, the state ranked sixth in the U.S., with one in every 140 of its homes in distress. New Jersey was first with one in every 62 homes.

Nationwide, 676,535 properties — 0.51 percent of all U.S. housing units — had at least one foreclosure filing in 2017, down 27 percent for the year and the lowest level since 2005.