Foreclosures have continued to drop this year, keeping the area at what experts consider a normal level of troubled homeowners.
At midyear, fewer than 1% of the homes in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte counties were stuck in the foreclosure mill, well below the peak of the recession when the area posted one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.
Sarasota-Manatee recorded 1,466 foreclosure filings during the first half of 2017, with one in every 278 homes — or 0.36% — in some form of distress, real estate researcher Attom Data Solutions reported.
That is down by 7% from 2016 and by 57% from 2015. The two counties ranked 76th out of the 217 largest U.S. metro areas.
In Charlotte, 392 foreclosure filings were reported from January through June, off by 44% from last year and 63% from two years ago. One in every 258 homes, or 0.39%, sat in the foreclosure process.
Florida reported the nation's seventh-highest foreclosure rate with 0.46% of its homes with a default notice, scheduled auction or bank repossession.
The U.S. rate was 0.32%, with one in every 311 homes with a foreclosure filing in the first half of the year.
"With a few local market exceptions, foreclosures have become the unicorns of the housing market — hard to find but highly sought after," said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president with Attom. "More than 38% of properties sold at foreclosure auction in the first half of this year went to third-party buyers rather than back to the bank — the highest share we've ever seen going back as far as 2000, the earliest this data is available.
"Although foreclosures are fading overall, there has been a notable uptick in foreclosures completed by some nonbank entities — counter to the sharp downward foreclosure trend among big banks and government-backed loans," he said. "These divergent foreclosure trends are likely the result of the big banks and government agencies selling off distressed loans over the past few years to non-bank entities that are now foreclosing on an increasing volume of that deferred distress."
In June, there were 307 foreclosure filings in Sarasota-Manatee, down 11% over the year. That worked out to one in every 1,326 homes, which ranked 50th among the 217 largest U.S. metro areas.
Charlotte last month reported 62 filings, a decline of 59%. One in every 1,632 homes there were in foreclosure.
Florida, with a judicial foreclosure process, has the fourth-longest timeline to complete foreclosures at an average 1,203 days, Attom said.
