Rhode Island foreclosures fall in April

PROVIDENCE – The number of foreclosure filings in Rhode Island dropped 16 percent in April compared with the same month last year, RealtyTrac said Thursday.
The Irving, Calif.-based real estate tracking firm said that 493 residential properties in the state received a notice of trustee sale last month, down from 652 last April. Lenders repossessed another 230 homes, up from 209 the same month last year.
All told, RealtyTrac said foreclosure filings touched one in every 625 properties in the Ocean State last month.
RealtyTrac said foreclosure notices touched a higher percentage of homes in 12 other states.
But while notices fell in April compared with the same month last year, they were up 34 percent from March 2011.
Across the United States, RealtyTrac said some 219,258 properties – or 1 in every 593 homes – received a foreclosure filing last month. The total number of properties marked a 34 percent decline from April 2010 and a 9 percent drop from March 2011.
“Foreclosure activity decreased on an annual basis for the seventh-straight month in April, bringing foreclosure activity to a 40-month low,” RealtyTrac CEO James J. Saccacio said. “This slowdown continues to be largely the result of massive delays in processing foreclosures rather than the result of a housing recovery that is lifting people out of foreclosure.”
Last year some prominent lenders, including Bank of America, temporarily halted foreclosure proceedings as they rushed to sort out questionable paperwork. While lenders have now lifted the moratoriums, they are taking longer to move properties through the process.
Nationwide, foreclosures in the first quarter of 2011 took an average of 400 days from the initial default notice to completion, up from 340 days in the first quarter of 2010 and more than double the average 151 days it took to foreclose in the first quarter of 2007.
“The first delay occurs between delinquency and foreclosure, when lenders and services are no longer automatically pushing loans that are more than 90 days delinquent into foreclosure but are waiting longer to allow for loan modifications, short sales and possibly other disposition alternatives,” Saccacio said. “Data from the Mortgage Bankers Association shows that about 3.7 million properties are in this seriously delinquent stage. The second delay occurs after foreclosure has started, when lenders are taking much longer than they were just a few years ago to complete the foreclosure process.”