Georgia, one of the states that suffered most in the burst of the housing bubble, continues to see the painful tide of foreclosures slowly ebb.
The number of foreclosures fell 19.8 percent in the past year, down to 22,094 as of April, according to a report issued today from California-based CoreLogic.
Roughly 3 percent of the properties in Georgia with mortgages were in serious delinquencies, but that rate has dropped 18.4 percent since 2015, CoreLogic reported.
Nine years after the housing crash began in Georgia, the rate of problem mortgages is finally back to the average level nationally. Georgia represents 5.4 percent of the 406,000 mortgages in foreclosure across the country.
The foreclosure wave started when home prices peaked and started dropping, while an epidemic of layoffs wreaked havoc on household finances. So the slow recovery continues to depend on two key elements: home prices rising and job creation.
“Negative equity” – that is, a home value still below what is owed on the mortgage – remains a problem, albeit one that has been improving.
“The number of homeowners who have negative equity has fallen by two-thirds since its 2010 peak, and the number of borrowers in foreclosure proceedings has also continued to drop,” said Anand Nallathambi, president and CEO of CoreLogic. “Despite this progress, about four million homeowners remained underwater at the end of the first quarter, and these borrowers are more vulnerable to foreclosure proceedings if they should fall delinquent.”
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