The REAL DEAL reports that foreclosure activity in New York City continued its pattern of ups and downs during the first six months of 2010, climbing 3 percent on a year-over-year basis but registering a 24 percent drop from the six months prior, according to the latest foreclosure market report from RealtyTrac. These figures include Manhattan, The Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. Manhattan alone amount to only 1,238 foreclosures.
“It’s been a little bit of a roller coaster ride,” said Daren Blomquist, a spokesperson for RealtyTrac. “Even though you see a big decrease from the previous six months, in most of the boroughs there’s either a slight increase or maybe a big increase from a year ago, so that tells me we’re not truly trending downward…basically, things are staying steady.”
It was a similar story statewide, where 24,506 properties were hit with foreclosure notices during the first half of the year, up 1.22 percent from the same time last year but down 19.84 percent from the previous six months, RealtyTrac data shows.
Meanwhile, bank repossessions in particular were way up during the second quarter, registering a 47 percent year-over-year statewide spike that may indicate that lenders are catching up on their foreclosure backlogs, Blomquist said.
But the state’s foreclosure rate — 0.31 percent, or one in every 326 properties — was the 10th-lowest in the country, well below the national average of 1.28 percent.
The city’s rate was even lower at 0.29 percent, with 9,561 properties receiving foreclosure notices during the first half of 2010.
“Even though the foreclosure numbers are low, there are a couple of mitigating factors in New York that make it harder to get a read,” Blomquist cautioned. “New York has the longest foreclosure process of any state, so there’s less immediacy in the numbers. It can take over a year, whereas in [some] other states it is as short as a month.”
He continued: “The other factor is that New York has been fairly aggressive in enacting legislation to prevent foreclosure,” referring to recent state legislation that allows struggling borrowers an extra 90 days to try to correct the situation before the foreclosure process can start.
Even still, certain pockets of the city are suffering. There were five New York City zip codes with foreclosure rates that beat the national average in the first half of the year. Zip code 11436, in South Jamaica, Queens, had the highest foreclosure rate in the five boroughs with 1.79 percent of housing units receiving notices during the first six months of 2010. Jamaica has been the New York City neighborhood hit hardest by the foreclosure crisis.
Next-highest was 10303, in the northwest corner of Staten Island, which had a rate of 1.49 percent. That was followed by Lower Manhattan’s zip code 10005, which, despite its very small number of housing units, had a 1.46 percent foreclosure rate because of eight homes that received foreclosure notices during the six-month stretch.
Also besting the national average for foreclosures were two zip codes near St. Albans, Queens — 11412 and 11429, which had 1.33 percent and 1.31 percent foreclosure rates, respectively.