Home Foreclosure Statistics: For First Time in History, Foreclosures Top 1 Million & That’s Not the Worst of It

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Lenders seized more than 1 million homes last year, surpassing the number of foreclosures in 2009 by almost 100,000, when the number topped out at 918,000.

And, that’s not the worst of it.

Home Foreclosure Rates: 3 Million Home Foreclosures Possible?

According to the Reuters report, U.S. 2010 home foreclosures top 1 mln for first time, that number could have been much higher — topping 3 million, if it had not been for the 4th Quarter fall off which was precipitated by the home foreclosure robosigning scandal. The article states:

Total properties receiving foreclosure filings would have easily exceeded 3 million in 2010 had it not been for the fourth-quarter drop in foreclosure activity — triggered primarily by the continuing controversy surrounding foreclosure documentation and procedures that prompted many major lenders to temporarily halt some foreclosure proceedings . . .

Home Foreclosures Statistics: 2011 Expected to Be Worse — Will Top 1 Million Again

The outlook is not good for the next couple of years, according to some housing and finance experts. Proof? According to the Philadelphia Inquirer article, Rise forecast in housing foreclosures, but Phila. area mostly unscathed:

. . . 1.2 million U.S. homes likely will be repossessed by lenders this year, 20 percent more than in 2010, RealtyTrac of Irvine, Calif., which tracks foreclosures nationwide, reported Thursday. . . Economist Patrick Newport of IHS Global Insight in Lexington, Mass., said foreclosures were likely to remain horribly high for a year or two because so many homes – 23 percent nationally – are deeply underwater, meaning that more is owed on them than they are worth.

Good News on the Home Foreclosure Front

There is a silver lining to all of this — it seems that the market is bottoming out and that the only way for things to go is up. So, American homeowners can at least start to feel optimistic about a couple of things:

(i) That the value of their homes will start to come back (albeit slowly); and

(ii) The real estate market as a whole will have corrected itself, bringing prices on homes in line with what they should have been all along, instead of the inflated values we saw before this whole home foreclosure crisis.

In the words of Jesse Jackson, at least we can “Keep hope alive!”

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