Neighborhoods across the US are seeing fewer "empty and decaying" properties
Now that Halloween is over, it seems the zombies are returning to their graves.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019, vacant “zombie” foreclosures represented 2.96% of the 288,300 homes in the process of foreclosure – down 3.2% from the last quarter, according to a report from ATTOM Data Solutions.
Washington, D.C. continued to have the highest percentage of zombie foreclosures (10.5%). And states where the zombie foreclosure rates were above the national rate included Kansas (7.9 percent), Oregon (7.9%), Montana (7.4%), Maine (6.7%) and New Mexico (5.8%).
Meanwhile, the lowest rates – all less than 1.2% – were in North Dakota, Arkansas, Idaho, Colorado, and Delaware.
Read more: 10 states with the lowest average mortgage rates
Over 1.5 million (1,527,142) US single family homes and condos were vacant in the fourth quarter, representing 1.5% of all homes.
“The fourth quarter of 2019 was a repeat of the third quarter when it came to properties abandoned by owners facing foreclosure: the scourge continued to fade,” said Todd Teta, chief product officer at ATTOM Data Solutions. “One of the most visible signs of the housing market crash during the Great Recession keeps receding into the past. While pockets of zombie foreclosures remain, neighborhoods throughout the country are confronting fewer and fewer of the empty, decaying properties that were symbolic of the fallout from the housing market crash during the recession.”
