It’s Halloween, and while there will be numerous little zombies wandering neighborhood streets this evening, it’s unlikely we will see much of another kind of walking dead: The elusive zombie foreclosure.
That is because the U.S. labor market and economy at large remain relatively strong. With most homeowners gainfully employed and a majority “rate locked” into their current mortgages, mortgage performance continues to be stellar.
As per ATTOM’s most recent Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report, there’s currently only about 7,100 pre-foreclosure properties sitting vacant. And while that figure represents a slight increase in “zombie foreclosures” compared with the third quarter, it is down 20.2% from the fourth quarter of 2023.
The report shows that about 1.4 million residential properties in the U.S. are vacant.
That figure represents 1.3%, or one in 77 homes, across the nation – virtually the same as in third quarter and up just slightly from a year ago.
The report analyzes publicly recorded real estate data collected by ATTOM — including foreclosure status, equity and owner-occupancy status — matched against monthly updated vacancy data.
The report also reveals that 215,601 residential properties in the U.S. are in the process of foreclosure in the fourth quarter, down 3.3% from the third quarter and down 32.8% from the fourth quarter of 2023.
The latest count of zombie homes extends a long-term pattern of those properties representing only a tiny portion of the nation’s total housing stock, currently at just one of every 14,591 homes around the U.S.
“The near-total disappearance of zombie foreclosures has been and still is one of the more subtle but important benefits of the country’s soaring housing market,” says Rob Barber, CEO for ATTOM, in the report. “Those properties have gone from a plague in many areas of the U.S. following the Great Recession of the late 2000s, when millions of homes fell into foreclosure, to a distant memory in most communities today.
“That’s unlikely to change much in the near future given that record home prices are keeping home-equity levels at historic highs and foreclosures cases dropping,” Barber adds. “On top of that, the supply of homes is so tight that even when a property is abandoned, buyers are more likely to swoop in and pick it up.”
Photo: Luis Georg Müller
