How bad is the foreclosure problem in NH? Really? - Granite Grok

How bad is the foreclosure problem in NH? Really?

If you listen to just the MSM press, you might get the impression that every other house on the street is in foreclosure.  Sad stories, true, of people forced to leave their homes. Every story is painted as the families being victims of an uncaring financial system (or society).

Some, I do believe, are at no fault of their own – solid citizens, buying within their means, and paying monthly on time, sometimes for years.  A job loss, a problem in another area – it happens.  For others though, they gambled / speculated and lost the bet.  Others bought homes well beyond their means and took advantage of easy credit being offered (sometimes, because Congress passed laws stating that they had to – remember redlining with banks got taken out to the woodshed for denying credit?  Many of them may well be those that should not have received that credit after all).

Anyways – we hear of the percentages – but what are the real numbers?  This story from NH Business Report sheds a bit of light:

N.H. foreclosures fall 25% in June

The number of foreclosures in New Hampshire decreased significantly in June, according to a new report.

RealtyTrac, a provider of national real estate marketing data, reported that Granite State foreclosures dropped 25.59 percent from May.

Still, the state’s foreclosure rate remains high – it has increased by 17.25 percent from June 2007.

Percentages are nice, and on large numbers, makes more sense (at times) to use percentages rather than the actuals.  However, when doing so, it is assumed that the readers or listeners know the actual numbers. But I certainly didn’t know what they were – did you?

According to RealtyTrac, the number of “Notice of Trustee” sales in June was 307. REO properties, or “Real Estate Owned” by lender — those that have been foreclosed on and repurchased by the bank — stood at 196. That means a total of 503 homes were in some phase of foreclosure last month.

I wish I knew what the total number of houses were in NH – I’m quite sure that it is at least a couple of orders of magnitude larger than 503.  Remember, it is in the large that we should make good policy and not the individual case. At least we can get the sense of the national numbers:

Nationally, New Hampshire ranked in the middle of pack, in 26th place, for number of foreclosures.

Nationally, the foreclosure rate dropped 3.4 percent from May but has jumped 53.28 percent since June 2007, with one in every 501 U.S. households filing for foreclosure — 252,363 properties in all.

That’s out of 126,433,863 total houses, if my math is correcty

 

 

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