Phoenix drops from top 10 in foreclosures

The Phoenix fell from the top 10 in RealtyTrac’s Q3 2009 Metropolitan Foreclosure Market Report published Wednesday.

The metro ranked 12th with 2.43 percent or 40,566 of local homes affected by foreclosure. That’s up 4.7 percent from the second quarter and 18.7 percent from a year ago. Phoenix ranked 9th in the second quarter.

Las Vegas was No. 1 at 5.13 percent. A total of 40,408 Las Vegas properties received a foreclosure filing during the quarter, an increase of nearly 9 percent from the previous quarter and an increase of nearly 54 percent from the third quarter of 2008.

Cities in California, Florida and Nevada accounted for the 10 highest foreclosure rates in the third quarter among metro areas with a population of 200,000 or more. But five of those top 10 metro areas reported decreasing foreclosure activity from the third quarter of 2008, while many other metro areas with top 50 foreclosure rates reported sharp increases in foreclosure activity.

Other metro areas in the top 10 were the California cities of Merced (3.72 percent), Stockton (3.53 percent), Modesto (3.39 percent), Riverside-San Bernardino (3.37 percent), Bakersfield (2.88 percent), and Vallejo-Fairfield (2.85 percent), along with the Reno-Sparks metro area in Nevada (2.67 percent) and the Florida metro areas of Cape Coral-Fort Myers (3.67 percent), Port St. Lucie (2.63 percent) and Orlando-Kissimmee (2.57 percent).

“Rising unemployment and a new variety of mortgage resets continued to gradually shift the nation’s foreclosure epicenters in the third quarter away from the hot spots of the last two years and toward some metro areas that had avoided the brunt of the first foreclosure wave,” said James J. Saccacio, CEO of RealtyTrac, in a news release. “While toxic subprime mortgages drove much of that first wave of foreclosures, high unemployment and exotic Alt-A Option ARMs are spreading the foreclosure flood to more metro areas in 2009.”

The report also noted a few new foreclosure hot spots surfacing, including Prescott with a 77 percent increase over 3Q 2008. The three biggest year-over-year increases were in Boise City-Nampa, Idaho, and Provo-Orem and Salt Lake City in Utah.

Tucson was No. 41 on the list. Arizona ranked second in the third quarter, according to the company’s report issued earlier this month.

http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2009/10/12/daily67.html

California-based RealtyTrac is an online marketplace of foreclosure properties, with more than 1.5 million default, auction and bank-owned listings from over 2,200 U.S. counties, along with detailed property, loan and home sales data.