House Foreclosed Listings Climbing up in Wisconsin
House foreclosed listings are growing in Wisconsin, based on data from the Mortgage Bankers Association and from a California-based real estate research company.
The MBA reported that 11 percent of all mortgage loans in the state were in default or in foreclosure at the end of September. Although the percentage was lower than the national rate of 14 percent, the state percentage was still high, putting Wisconsin among the top 20 states in foreclosure activity in the middle months of 2009.
Russell Kashian, economics professor at the University of Wisconsin in Whitewater, said that more homeowners in Wisconsin throughout the state will lose their houses to foreclosure in December and in 2010 because of unemployment.
Kashian predicted that foreclosure filings in the fourth quarter this year will increase by 20 percent compared to the same period last year. MBA economist Jay Brinkmann said that defaults and foreclosures will continue to worsen across the country because of job losses. He added that the foreclosure situation will only improve if the job problem is addressed.
In October this year, the pace of foreclosures in Wisconsin soared by more than 128 percent from October last year to one out of 594 residential units, putting more than 4,300 units in the process of foreclosure, including 1,170 units into house foreclosed listings.
Nearly 2,000 housing units received lis pendens notices and a total of 1,158 households received notices of trustee sales. The rate of foreclosure increased by nearly 4 percent from the second quarter.
In Wisconsin, the unemployment rate declined slightly in October to 7.6 percent, the lowest level reached by the state this year. However, according to the Department of Workforce Development, the October jobless rate was still 3.2-percentage-point higher than the jobless rate in October last year.
Most job losses in October occurred in the leisure, hospitality, manufacturing and construction sectors. Non-farm jobs dropped by 129,600 during October and the total civilian workforce in the state dropped by nearly 18,000 to about 3.045 million in October.
Over the past 12 months, the state had lost almost 130,000 jobs, causing more homeowners to default on their home loans.
Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle and other state agency heads have launched various programs to help solve the problem of unemployment, but just like other states, the economic downturn has hindered businesses and government agencies from creating more jobs and from helping more homeowners save their houses from house foreclosed listings.
