House Repo Filings Continue to Rise in Utah
The Provo-Orem metropolitan areas in Utah posted 3,168 house repo filings from January to June this year, earning them the 31st spot among over 200 areas in the country in terms of high foreclosure-related filings.
The Utah County community’s foreclosure filings represented 2.2 percent of the total houses in the area, a whopping increase of 129 percent from the first half last year.
Occupying the 58th position on the ranking for metropolitan areas in terms of foreclosure filings is Salt Lake with 5,322 distressed houses, representing 1.4 percent of the total housing units. The figures are 63.2 percent higher compared with the first half of last year.
In the Ogden-Clearfield area, 1.4 percent or 2,397 houses received some kind of foreclosure filing, including notices of default, auctions or bank foreclosures. The figures represented an 82 percent increase from 2008.
The metropolitan areas of Provo-Orem, Salt Lake and Ogden-Clearfield posted foreclosure rates that are slightly higher compared with the national average. The national foreclosure rate was 1.2 percent of the total houses.
Since 2007, Utah’s real estate market was on a downward trend with a great number of defaults and foreclosures. However, industry experts noted that the housing market in the area is starting to show some improvements, in terms of sales and property prices.
But financially-strapped distressed homeowners are still having difficulty selling their properties and fetching a high price for them to cover their mortgages. Industry experts pointed out the worsening economic condition in Utah and the climbing unemployment rate as harbinger of the growing foreclosure crisis in the area.
They took consolation on figures showing that the decline in economy and unemployment situations in Utah is not as steep compared with other states in the country. Metropolitan areas in Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada received the brunt of the foreclosure crisis in the first half of this year.
Twenty-nine cities from these four states dominated the top 30 list of areas with the highest number of foreclosure properties. Las Vegas, Nevada took the top spot with one out of 12 properties at risk of foreclosure. The city’s foreclosure rate was six times higher than the national average rate of one in every 84. Second in the list is Cape Coral-Fort Myers in Florida with 1 in every 14 properties, followed by Merced with 1 in every 15 homes.
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- Florida, Orlando Again on Top of Foreclosed Property Chart
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- Soaring Number of Foreclosed Properties in Hawaii
