Foreclosures jump in Florida, fall in Orlando | Video

Mary Shanklin on Realty Trac's recent report that shows Florida leading the nation in foreclosures.

Florida led the nation in foreclosure filings during June, though Orlando experienced a decline in activity compared with a year earlier, a new report shows.

There were hints in the latest monthly report from real-estate-research company RealtyTrac Inc. that Metropolitan Orlando could be working its way out of the bog of foreclosures that has weighed down the area's housing market for about five years.

"There is an indication that the shadow inventory is still there, but there is also an indication that the courts in Florida are slowly but surely working through the shadow inventory," said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.

While the number of foreclosure-related court filings statewide increased 30 percent in June from a year earlier, filings in Metro Orlando actually fell 13 percent. About 2,215 houses in the four-county metro area received some kind of foreclosure-related legal notice last month.

Another sign that the area could be headed further toward recovery was a decline in the number of houses that entered foreclosure in June. The owners of 906 houses in Orange, Osceola, Seminole and Lake counties received their first notice of foreclosure, compared with about double that number of foreclosure starts in June 2012.

Comparing June with the month before, both the state and the nation experienced double-digit percentage declines in the number of houses entering foreclosure. Altogether, foreclosure starts last month fell in 38 states, including Nevada, down 84 percent; Colorado, down 62 percent; New Jersey, down 40 percent; Illinois, down 39 percent; and Florida, down 26 percent.

"We definitely noticed that the foreclosure starts, after surging last year and earlier this year, are starting to taper off in Florida," Blomquist said.

Despite the slowing of houses just entering the process, Orlando and Florida remain far more troubled by foreclosures than the rest of the country. Orlando had one foreclosure legal action filed for every 421 houses in June, while Florida had one for every 355 houses. Those rates were double the nationwide rate.

The foreclosure process in Florida, which can take years, has gotten only longer, even though fewer houses are being foreclosed on by lenders. In June, the entire process in Florida took on average a record 907 days ? one of the longest terms in the country, trailing only New York and New Jersey.

"We expect those timelines to eventually turn a corner and go down, and then we will know that the backlog has been worked," Blomquist said.

States with substantial year-over-year increases in scheduled, judicial foreclosure auctions during June included New Jersey, up 103 percent; Florida, up 100 percent; Maryland, up 94 percent; New York, up 66 percent; and Illinois, up 65 percent.

For the first half of the year, Florida, Nevada, Illinois, Ohio and Georgia posted the five highest state foreclosure rates. And the five metro areas with the highest foreclosure rates were all in Florida: Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, Ocala and Tampa.

mshanklin@tribune.com or 407-420-5538

Source: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/os-foreclosure-report-june-20130711,0,511650.story?track=rss

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