Chicago foreclosure news remains troubling
July 28th, 2010 categories: Chicago Real Estate News
There are two things that our economy needs to gain momentum: We need unemployment to fall and housing foreclosures to drop.
The latest economic numbers brought mixed news on these two key factors.
In good news, the unemployment rate for Illinois fell to 10.4 percent in June. That’s down .4 percent from May. That may seem like a tiny drop, but June’s dip marks the third straight month in which Illinois’ unemployment rate fell.
The news is more mixed concerning Chicago’s foreclosure rate.
According to the latest numbers from online foreclosure company RealtyTrac, foreclosure filings in the Chicago area jumped 30.4 percent in June when compared to the same month one year earlier. However, foreclosures did fall 4.28 percent when compared to May of this year.
According to a Chicago Sun-Times story on the numbers, RealtyTrac is reporting that there is now a “fragile stability” in housing markets across the country.
The Sun-Times verifies this by pointing out that June’s year-over-year increase of 30.4 percent is an improvement when compared to the year-over-year increase of June, 2009. Back then, housing foreclosures had jumped 38 percent.
What is sobering, though, is that more than 1 million U.S. households are expected to lose their homes to foreclosure this year, according to the RealtyTrac data. This is worse than last year, when banks and lenders repossessed more than 900,000 homes.
To get a sense of how bad of a year 2009 was for homeowners, consider this historical fact: Lenders in a typical year repossess about 100,000 homes across the United States.
Fortunately, the rate of foreclosure filings is dropping. In 2009, lenders filed a record-setting 2.8 million foreclosure filings in the United States. We won’t break or equal that record this year.
That’s the good news. But the unfortunate truth is that the United States is in line to see too many housing foreclosures once again in 2010. Until that changes, don’t expect our nation’s economic recovery to actually feel like one.
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