Rising Foreclosures In King County

March 24th, 2008

A recent report has declared that there has been a hike in the volume of foreclosures in King County. However, the rate has neither reached a peak locally, nor nationally. RealtyTrac, a company which keeps track observed that foreclosures in Washington, in February, foreclosed properties had jumped up by 37 percent. In comparison to last year, there had been a nationwide increase of 60 percent in the number of properties facing foreclosure. There had been a 4 percent drop in the volume of foreclosure in the national level. This was however less than the drop that had happened during last year.

In the meanwhile, in Washington, the rate of foreclosure hiked up by 0.9 percent since January and in King County, the rate had hiked up by 7.6 percent since January. RealtyTrac had faced a crisis in data collection during the previous year and as a result, they were unable to give a proper figure for the year-to-year change in King County. Trustee sales are the primary step in the process of foreclosure and according to the records of the county, the trustee sale notices had gone up by 104 percent in the month of February since last year. This state witnesses only one filing for every 1,194 households, which is not even half of the national rate. In this context it ranks 28^th among all the states.

Foreclosures in Seattle area, in February there was one filing for every 1,450 households. On a list of metropolitan areas, that puts Seattle in the 166^th position out of 229. In January it had been in the 173^rd place. According to James Saccacio, the chief executive of Realty Trac, the nationwide annual increase of 60 percent in the volume of foreclosure, was greater than thrice the increase seen between February 2006 and 2007. He goes on to sat that the peak, in this cycle of foreclosure crisis has not yet been reached.

The highest rate of foreclosure in Nevada was recorded, where one out of every 165 homes was facing foreclosure. Next in line came the states of California and Florida foreclosure homes, where one out of every 242 homes and 254 homes were facing foreclosures, respectively. The states of California and Florida had the maximum number of filings and the two together made up 38.5 percent of all the properties facing foreclosure in the U.S. Among the metropolitan areas, Cape Coral-Fort Myers recorded the maximum number of foreclosures, where one out of every 84 households was facing foreclosure.