Findings from a report by land, property, and real estate data curator ATTOM maintain home foreclosures are increasing but represent a small presence on the nationwide real estate landscape.
According to ATTOM, the second-quarter 2023 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report showed 1.3 million (1,285,633) residential properties in the United States are vacant, representing 1.3 percent, or one in 79 homes, across the nation.
The report data stemmed from ATTOM analyzing county tax assessor data for 101 million residential properties for vacancy, broken down by foreclosure status and owner-occupancy status. Only metropolitan statistical areas with at least 100,000 residential properties and counties with at least 50,000 residential properties were included in the analysis.
“Zombie foreclosures keep inching up as lenders pursue more delinquent homeowners in courts around the country,” ATTOM Chief Executive Officer Rob Barber said. “All indications are that the number of zombie properties will keep going up slowly, given that foreclosures are up. But abandoned properties are still nothing more than a dot on the radar screen among the majority of neighborhoods. We are still a long way from the fallout after the Great Recession of the late 2000s, when this was a very real issue in many areas around the U.S.”
ATTOM determined via its report 311,508 domestic residential properties are in the process of foreclosure in the second quarter of this year, representing a rise of 4.3 percent from the first quarter of 2023 and a 20.2 percent increase from the second quarter of 2022. According to ATTOM, an increasing number of homeowners have faced possible foreclosure since a nationwide moratorium on lenders pursuing delinquent homeowners imposed after the Coronavirus pandemic in early 2020 was lifted in the middle of 2021.