Foreclosure notices hit new record

By Michelle E. Shaw

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Foreclosure notices in metro Atlanta jumped to a record high in March, although one expert said that's no surprise.

“We’ve been expecting this,” said John O'Callaghan, chief executive of the Atlanta Neighborhood Development Partnership.

O'Callaghan said financial institutions that held off on foreclosures late last year are now moving forward again.

“There was a sort of kink in the pipeline as folks tried workout plans and that sort of thing,” he said. “Now we’ve got a fairly high number of foreclosures coming out of the pipeline.”

But another expert said the jump is a troubling sign that the region's high unemployment is taking a toll.

“Unemployment is still rising and I think this is just good old fashioned economic hardship, people losing jobs and can’t make payments,” Richard Martin, associate professor of real estate at the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business, said of the March foreclosure notices. “Times are getting tougher for a lot of people.”

There were 12,568 foreclosure notices in the 13-county metro area for March, 22 percent more than February’s 10,318 published notices and 24 percent more than the 10,138 advertised a year ago, according to Alpharetta-based Equity Depot.

The largest number of foreclosures published prior to this month was 12,318 in September of last year.

Equity Depot tracks notices published each month for public auctions scheduled for the following month. March’s numbers count the homes set for auction in April. Not all the listed homes will actually be foreclosed upon, as some homeowners catch up on payments or work out deals with lenders.

While pent-up lender actions may have fueled the jump in March, O'Callaghan agreed the unemployment situation in metro Atlanta isn’t helping.

The state’s economy has lost 375,000 jobs in two years – more than 8 percent of all positions. Metro Atlanta's jobless rate in January climbed to 10.8 percent – also a record in the four decades in which consistent data has been kept.

Nearly a half-million Georgians are officially out of work, not counting 99,000 people who have dropped out of the workforce or left the state, according to government figures.

Staff writer Michael Kanell contributed to this report.