Decline continues in Virginia, the District
Despite new signals that the region’s economic growth is accelerating, Maryland’s foreclosure rate soared by triple digits in the first quarter while the same measure dipped sharply in the District and Virginia.
RealtyTrac, a foreclosure-tracking firm, will report on Thursday that the number of foreclosures in Maryland climbed 124 percent in the first quarter of 2013 compared to the same three-month span a year ago.
| Plenty of properties |
| In the first quarter of 2013, 9,339 Maryland properties were in foreclosure proceedings. |
So far this year, the foreclosure rate has fallen by 31 percent in D.C., 24 percent in Virginia and 23 percent nationwide.
“The recent backlash in foreclosure activity in Maryland was expected, although it took longer to materialize than we anticipated,” said RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist. “We expect the upward trend in Maryland foreclosure activity to continue throughout most of the rest of this year.”
The District and Virginia posted a quarterly improvement despite a dismal March. RealtyTrac’s data showed that D.C. posted a 225 percent surge in foreclosures between February and March. Foreclosures in Virginia climbed by 18 percent.
But even as foreclosures increased in March, other indicators showed that the area’s economy is rebounding.
The federal government said on Wednesday that unemployment in the D.C. region had slipped to 5.5 percent in February, down from 5.7 percent in January.
And new statistics from RealEstate Business Intelligence showed that the median sale price for homes in the D.C. area last month rose to $372,500 — an 8 percent increase from March 2012.
Experts said they were not surprised, though, that Maryland was struggling with foreclosures after it moved at the height of the housing malaise to force lenders to try to work with residents facing foreclosure.
“One of the consequences of such proactive efforts is that it delayed a lot of necessary and inevitable foreclosures that otherwise would have happened in 2010 and 2011 — and did happen in states like Virginia with a much shorter foreclosure process — and pushed them into 2012 and 2013,” Blomquist said.
But Thomas Lawler, a former chief economist of Fannie Mae, said the deferred foreclosures likely helped some residents to save their homes if their economic standing improved during the broader recovery.
“Maybe there won’t be some foreclosures that, if they had not had the delays, would have happened,” Lawler said. “But there’s an awful lot there that were going to happen and they’ve been delayed.”
