Posts (RSS)Home Foreclosure Listing Still Growing in Atlanta
Home foreclosure listing is still growing in metro Atlanta despite published reports of declining foreclosures in other metro areas in the country.
According to data from Alpharetta-based real estate research firm Equity Depot, nearly 117,000 residential properties in metro Atlanta will have been notified of foreclosure by the end of the year if the current foreclosure pace does not slow down.
Barry Bramlett of Equity Depot said that the main reason for foreclosures now is no longer subprime lending but unemployment and other effects of the recession. In the past years, defaulting borrowers were able to quickly sell their houses to be able to pay their loans, but now they cannot sell even at low prices.
According to Dan Immergluck, regional and city planning professor at Georgia Tech, the largest growth in home foreclosure listing are in the counties of Gwinnett, Cobb, Forsyth and Cherokee. He explained that the foreclosure crisis has reached the higher-cost communities in the suburbs.
As of January, the highest number of foreclosure notices was posted in Fulton County, which had more than 18,600 filings. At its current pace, Fulton is expected to reach 35 percent more filings than last year. Gwinnett, which had already more than 17,000 filings, is expected to reach 71 percent more filings than last year.
Out of the 13 counties surveyed, only DeKalb County has not yet surpassed total filings in 2008, but it is expected to reach 13,677 foreclosure filings or 30 percent more filings this year compared to last year.
Meanwhile, Cobb County is expected to reach 12,833 filings, 57 percent more than last year’s filings. Cobb has about 201,000 houses, according to Steve Palm of SmartNumbers. With Equity Depot foreclosure data, over 6 percent of 201,000 homes will have been notified of foreclosure by the end of the year. In contrast, only 15,253 houses were notified of foreclosure in 2000.
Palm said that around one-third of households receiving foreclosure notices ultimately go into foreclosure. The percentage is higher than during the first months of the foreclosure crisis because many homeowners facing foreclosures now are prime borrowers. Oftentimes these borrowers have other resources they can use to prevent their properties from being repossessed by the banks.
Nonetheless, according to Atlanta analysts, even prime borrowers will not be able to prevent their properties from going into home foreclosure listing if the economy does not recover as quickly as hoped for.