The average interest rate on a 30-year mortgage rises to 7.62%, the highest since 2000

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Auction.com has released its 2023 Seller Insights Report which found that approximately 92% of default servicing industry leaders expect completed foreclosure volume to increase in 2023 compared to 2022, while 85% expect home prices to decline in 2023 compared to 2022.

The 2023 Seller Insights Report also revealed that economic conditions will have the biggest impact on foreclosure volumes for the remainder of 2023.

“The default servicing industry is on the frontlines of efforts to prevent foreclosure and keep more people in their homes,” said Auction.com CEO Jason Allnutt. “Those efforts successfully prevented myriad foreclosures during the pandemic and are continuing in earnest, which helps to explain why most in the default servicing industry are expecting foreclosure volume to increase only slightly to close out 2023.”

Auction.com’s report is based on a June 2023 survey of more than 50 leaders in the default mortgage servicing industry at the Auction.com Disposition Summit in Dallas. Survey respondents included an array of mortgage servicing professionals, from default servicing leaders in the mortgage asset investor arena, bank servicers, non-bank servicers, government agencies, and government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs).

More than nine in 10 Auction.com seller clients surveyed (92%) said they expect their organization’s completed foreclosure volume to increase in 2023 compared to 2022. Most of the 92% said they expect a slight increase (77%). The remaining 15% said they expect a substantial increase.

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ATTOM Data has released its new third quarter market trends report highlighting the blight of zombie homes and the impact they are having on the economy.

All in all, the report, which covers the third quarter of 2023, found that there were 1,277,612 vacant properties in the country. That figure represents 1.3%, or 1-in-79 homes, across the nation—the same as in the second quarter of this year.

Further, the report revealed that 315,425 zombie properties are in the process of foreclosure, up 1.3% from the second quarter of 2023 and up 16.6% year-over-year. A growing number of homeowners have faced possible foreclosure since a nationwide moratorium on lenders pursuing delinquent homeowners, imposed after the Coronavirus pandemic hit in early 2020, was lifted in the middle of 2021.

Among those homes, about 8,800 have been abandoned by the owners and qualify as a zombie foreclosure; this number is up from the prior quarter, or 0.3%, and up 13.9% from a year ago.

The latest increase marks the sixth straight quarterly gain. However, it was one of the smallest of the recent increases and continued to leave zombie foreclosures representing just a tiny fraction of the nation’s total stock of 101.6 million residential properties.

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Single-family homebuilders — and developers of small apartment projects, to a certain extent — are bucking the trend of the residential construction slowdown in the Twin Cities and beyond.

Rising interest rates and tighter lending standards have curtailed residential development in the Twin Cities so far this year, but single-family construction starts were up by double-digits for the second consecutive month in August, according to new data from the Keystone Report.

In August, cities in the 13-county metro area permitted 944 new homes overall (up 22% from August 2022), including 571 single-family houses (up 66%) and 373 planned multifamily units (down 13%), Keystone notes.

August continues a summertime comeback for single-family homebuilding. In July, the metro area saw permits for 446 new single-family homes, a 38% increase from July 2022. Single-family permits were off 9% in June.

For the year-to-date, single-family housing starts are still 21% behind 2022, while planned multifamily units are down 60% for 2023 so far, according to Keystone data.

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