St. Louisans are more likely to be behind on their mortgage, but less likely to lose their home to a bank, than they were a year ago, according to new figures out from First American Core Logic.
The real estate data firm found that about 1 in every 17 local mortgages (5.98 percent) were at least 90 days delinquent in January up from 4.02 percent in the same month last year.
The number of mortgages where banks had begun the foreclosure process grew at a similar pace, to 1.42 percent of loans this January from 0.97 percent last year.
But foreclosure is not an overnight process, and somewhere along the line, banks aren’t quite getting around to repossessing all those homes. The number of mortgages taken back by banks (classified as REO) fell, to 0.4 percent this January from 0.52 percent last year. That is progress.
It’s a trend that has held steady throughout most of the last 12 months, with delinquencies and foreclosure starts edging steadily upward while actual REOs stay flat or decline. And it may be a sign of at least some modest success for the massive foreclosure-relief efforts launched by the government, housing counseling groups and some banks.
Or it could just be a sign that banks are too overwhelmed to handle all the troubled mortgages in their pipelines and are putting off the actual repossession part of foreclosure.
The good news for St. Louis is that it fares better than the nation as a whole on all three of these categories. Massive troubles in the “Big Four” housing states of California, Florida, Arizona and Nevada continue to dominate the national statistics. And thankfully, we haven’t seen those troubles here.
The bad news is that mortgage lending, like the big banks that dominate it, is a nation-wide market. And so until those troubles in the bubble states ease, we probably won’t see widespread improvement here.
