Dallas-Fort Worth home foreclosure filings jump 30%

North Texas home foreclosure filings for December soared 30 percent from a year ago.

The jump in postings for December pushes the total for the year past 61,000 – a record for the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

More than 5,200 homes are facing forced sale by lenders next month in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties, Addison-based Foreclosure Listing Service said Thursday. It’s also the eighth time this year that monthly foreclosure postings were above 5,000.

The biggest percentage increase is in Collin County, where foreclosure filings are up 39 percent from a year ago.

This year’s D-FW foreclosures were up 23 percent from 2008’s total.

“Going back to the late 1980s, foreclosure postings are much higher than then,” Foreclosure Listing Service president George Roddy said. “Records are set every time the list comes out.”

In 1989, in the previous real estate crash, about 24,000 homes faced foreclosure.

This year, more than 26,000 Dallas County home foreclosure filings were recorded.

But the North Texas home market is more than twice the size it was 20 years ago, Roddy pointed out.

Not all homes posted for foreclosure each month are sold by the lenders. In some cases, the borrower works out new debt terms or the lender delays the sale.

Because of government and lender loan modification programs, almost 50 percent of the current foreclosure filings are repeats from previous months, Roddy said.

“With all the loan modifications, it’s hard to tell what is happening,” he said. “But every month, some loan modification requests are turned down and the properties go through foreclosure.”

Foreclosure filings for 2009 were almost double what they were five years ago.

Economists expect foreclosure volumes to remain high in North Texas until the economy rebounds.

A couple of years ago, most defaults were caused by subprime and adjustable-rate mortgage payments that rose.

“Now we mostly are past the worst of the mortgage mess,” said Dr. James Gaines, an economist with the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. “We can plot the monthly foreclosures with the unemployment rate.”

Until job growth resumes, Gaines said, foreclosures may not fall significantly.

“We still are lucky in Texas,” he said. “We are not getting hit nearly has hard as other areas of the country and have not lost jobs at nearly the rate of some of the other states.”

DALLAS-FORT WORTH AREA FORECLOSURE POSTINGS

 

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