Florida tops the list of serious mortgage delinquencies

Looking at the nation’s ‘seriously delinquent homeowners’ by state map we can find Florida with the highest percentage, according the the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The statistics show that 19.52% of Florida borrowers were either three months past due or in foreclosure in the third quarter. Add in borrowers who are 30 and 60 days laze and nearly one in four Floridians are behind on their loans.

However, the good news is that Florida’s seriously delinquent rate fell 0.61% from the previous quarter. But no other state met Florida’s lofty level of late payments, even Nevada, which leads the nation in foreclosure numbers is ranked second with 17.83% while Illinois managed to rank third with 10.77%.

This isn’t coming as a shocking new, because of Florida’s economy is very weak at this moment.

"With 48% of the state’s homeowners underwater, we’re going to continue to see delinquencies go up," said Jack McCabe, a real estate analyst in Deefield Beach. "The truth is a lot of people have given up and have stopped paying their mortgages."

"Part of the blame lies with the way foreclosures are handled in Florida," said Michael Fratantoni, the Mortgage Bankers’ vice president of research and economics." Florida and other states where foreclosures go through the courts have foreclosure inventories that are twice as high as so-called non-judicial states," he said.

The court system has only one part of the blame. The bigger culprits are a withering collapse in prices and an 11.9% jobless rate that’s well above the national unemployment rate of 9.6%.

Looking at the national picture, delinquency rate were down too, which can be attributed to a slight improvement in the job market, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association, which believes that the foreclosure moratorium has nothing to do with mortgage delinquency rate.

"The foreclosure paperwork issues announced by several large servicers in late September and early October are unlikely to have had a large impact on the third-quarter numbers,” Fratantoni said.

Posted by Istvan Fekete on Nov 25 2010. Filed under Residential. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry