Iowa 2017 Home Foreclosure Rates Follow National Trend

A national report released Thursday shows the overall number of foreclosure filings in the U.S. decreased in 2017 compared to 2016, reaching their lowest level since 2005. Iowa's number followed that trend.

Iowa ranked 28th among all states and the District of Columbia for the rate of foreclosure filings, with 2,368 — or 0.36 percent of the state's 1.35 million homes — starting the foreclosure process in 2017. That number was the lowest since 2011 and represented a 14 percent decline from the 2,751 filings in 2016 and a 39 percent drop from the decade peak of 3,870 filings in 2007.

Nationally, foreclosure filings for 2017 fell 27 percent compared to 2016, reaching their lowest level since 2005, according to the report. There were 676,535 properties with foreclosure filings in 2017, a 76 percent drop from when such filings were at a peak during the housing crisis in 2010.

New Jersey had the highest rate of foreclosure filings in the United States for 2017 and four of the five top foreclosure states were in the northeast part of the country, with Delaware, Maryland and Connecticut also in the top five. Illinois took fourth place.

The properties with foreclosure filings in 2017 represented 0.51 percent of all U.S. housing units, according to ATTOM Data, a multi-sourced property database. When filings were at a peak during the housing crisis, they represented 2.23 percent of all U.S. housing units. In 2017, lenders started the foreclosure process on 383,701 properties nationwide, according to the report, which said 318,165 properties were scheduled for foreclosure auction in 2017.

South Dakota, North Dakota, West Virginia, Montana and Mississippi had the lowest rates of foreclosure filings in the U.S. for 2017, according to the report.

“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,” Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions, said in a news release.

The report was based on publicly recorded and published foreclosure filings collected from more than 2,500 counties nationwide.

You can read the full report from ATTOM Data here.

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