Media reports increase in foreclosures

An AP story in today's Lowell Sun reports a nation-wide surge in foreclosures. This is old news to us here at the registry; so many of the documents we see these days are foreclosure-related or part of the debt collection process. And with each foreclosure, values slide a bit more which just traps more and more homeowners in a situation where they owe more on their mortgage than their house is worth.

Here's what I wrote on this site at the end of March about the direction of real estate:

Our recording statistics for March 2010 duplicate trends seen last month. When compared to the same time last year, the number of mortgages recorded is down substantially while the number of foreclosure-related documents is up. Specifically, the number of deeds recorded for the entire registry district slid slightly, from 439 in March 2009 to 414 in March 2010, a decline of 6%. Mortgages were down by a much greater margin, slipping from 1430 to 920, a drop of 36%. Foreclosure deeds jumped from 33 to 57, an increase of 73%, and orders of notice more than doubled, going from 43 to 112, a jump of 160%. The total number of documents recorded dropped 20%, from 5919 to 4709.

When these figures are broken out by the city of Lowell versus the nine towns in the district, the same trends persist, although there was a slightly greater drop in deeds and mortgages in the towns and a slightly greater increase of foreclosure documents in Lowell.