The zombies are still haunting the Southwest Florida housing market, but they are taking a smaller bite.
With Halloween just days away, zombie foreclosures — homes abandoned by their owners but not yet seized by lenders — now account for 5.6% of all distressed properties in the Sarasota-Manatee region, according to a new report by real estate researcher
Those undead properties made up 7.4% of homes in foreclosure one year ago.
Sarasota-Manatee ranked 37th among the 149 major U.S. metro areas measured for the share of zombie foreclosures, an improvement from 25th place a year ago.
While they are dying off, zombie foreclosures remain a blight in many neighborhoods, along with bank-owned homes that are vacant and not well maintained.
The two counties reported 1,361 residential properties in the foreclosure mill, with 76 of them no longer occupied.
The number of walking dead homes decreased by 32% over the year in Sarasota-Manatee. Fewer homes are entering the foreclosures process, courts are pushing cases through more quickly and rising prices are prompting banks to get the properties on the market.
"Zombie foreclosures have dwindled dramatically over the last four years as a supply-starved housing market has soaked up even some of the most highly distressed properties," said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at Attom.
"There are still pockets of the country with high zombie foreclosure rates, and high vacant property rates in general, primarily in the Rust Belt and parts of the Northeast and Southeast — driven in large part by a high share of non-owner-occupied vacant properties in those areas."
Charlotte County showed an increase in zombie foreclosures. A total of 24 homes, or 8.2%, of the 291 homes in foreclosure were vacant, up from 5.1% last year.
Florida reported 1,963 zombie homes, the third most in the nation. But that translated to a 4.5 percent rate of all foreclosures that ranked 22nd nationwide, the same as last year.
The Tampa-St. Petersburg region ranked fifth in the U.S. with 477 zombie foreclosures.
Nationwide, vacant zombie foreclosures were down 22% from a year ago, to 14,312 at the end of the third quarter. That was 67% below the peak of 44,030 in third-quarter 2013. The number of vacant bank-owned properties decreased 48% from a year ago to 24,026.
