Foreclosure filings increase by 151% in the Albany County

Filings of property foreclosures increased by 151 percent in the previous year in Albany, in N.Y, region. The figures brought out a few days ago estimated that the number of householders threatened with the foreclosure crisis is a small fraction of the property stocks.

RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing firm based in Irvine, Calif reported that the Albany-Schenectady-Troy region faced foreclosures of 2,416 homes in the year 2008. Properties plunge with further downturns in the market.

The number of foreclosed homes in Albany is only 0.6 percent of the properties in the MSA, which covers the Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady Schoharie and Albany Counties. Albany is estimated to be at No. 93 amongst the leading 100 metro areas across the nation to be affected by the foreclosure crisis. Stockton, Calif., was reported leading with the highest ratio of foreclosed properties, 9.5 percent in 2008. Stockton, Calif was followed by Las Vegas with 8.9 percent of foreclosed properties.

There were about 3.15 million filings of properties to be foreclosed on 2.33 million homes in the United States in 2008. These figures were reportedly an 81 percent increase in the number of properties foreclosed in the previous year 2007 and a 225 percent increase compared to the number of foreclosures in the year 2006.

Property foreclosures speeded up as interest rates shot up on variable mortgages in the middle of 2000. Property owners as a result found difficulty in bearing exorbitant payments every month. They were also not in a position to put their houses on sale, as markets sunk.

The foreclosure crisis also led to a slowdown on Wall Street as big financial firms were affected due to massive financial losses. Consumers have retreated from spending and several big organizations have cut down on the payrolls, bringing the economy further down.

Lawmakers in New York realized that new steps were necessary to make the legal action less severe and thus preventing the foreclosure problem from aggravating further. Those laws had proved effective in the latter part if 2008. James J. Saccacio, the CEO of RealtyTrac commented that the potential of the new laws to fight the foreclosure issue had weakened by December.

Foreclosure filings shot up by 17 percent in December compared to 41 percent in December 2007. Saccacio opined “Clearly the foreclosure prevention programs implemented to date have not had any real success in slowing down this foreclosure tsunami”. California was reported to experience the highest number of foreclosures in 2008, with about 523,624 properties being repossessed by banks.

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