Foreclosure Trend for past 24 months

The Realtrytrac website has data on foreclosure rates in their press releases. Each month they publish a press release with the number of foreclosure filings for that month. Foreclosure filings include : default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions. The number of foreclosure filings gives a relative measure of the foreclosure activity. I looked through Realtytrac's press releases for the past 2 years and pulled out the foreclosure filing figure for each month. The trend in foreclosure activity for the past 24 months is presented in the chart below:


As you can see foreclosure activity has been steadily increasing and has not yet shown any signs of dropping.

Note that these figures do not directly represent 'new' foreclosures but are a measure of foreclosure activity. I'm not sure but I think there may be duplication in the filings for each property with a property getting a notice one month and another notice a couple months later. But as a whole if the number goes up then that does accurately reflect an increase in foreclosure activity.

Realtytrac has only been tracking this figure since 2005 so there isn't much of any historical data to look back at. Their press releases only go back to 2007.

Note that the foreclosure rates vary widely from state to state. In one of their releases from early 2009 they broke the figures out state by state. At that time, California had more than 1 in 200 homes received a foreclosure filing but in Vermont less than 1 in 50,000 homes was in foreclosure.