RALEIGH – Even as Raleigh’s real estate has added more than $50 billion last year and with the region’s unemployment rate low, foreclosure proceedings have increased by 225% since last month in Wake County, new data shows.
And Wake County foreclosures are up by nearly 247% compared to a year ago, the report from ATTOM Data Solutions shows.
According to the data, which was shared with WRAL TechWire upon request, Wake County had 52 foreclosures in February 2022, up from 16 in January 2022 and 15 in February 2021.
Still, in Wake County’s 431,552 total housing units tracked by ATTOM, February’s total marks one in every 8,299 housing units at some stage of foreclosure.
Statewide, one in every 6,025 housing units are in foreclosure proceedings, the ATTOM data shows.
That’s a total of 768 foreclosures statewide in February 2022, according to the data set, up 35.7% from January 2022 and up 66.2% from a year ago, when there were 462 foreclosures in February 2021.
Report: North Carolina foreclosure filings up 85% from last year
Across the Triangle
In Johnston County, the number of foreclosures has increased month-over-month as well, rising to 10 total foreclosures in February 2022, according to the data set.
That’s equivalent to one foreclosure for every 7,544 housing units in Johnston County, and is an increase of nearly 43% from January 2022 when there were seven total foreclosures.
In February 2021, there were six foreclosures in Johnston County, the data showed.
The trends are a bit different in Orange County and Durham County than in Wake County and Johnston County, according to the data set.
For Orange County, there was just one of every 29,128 housing units in foreclosure during February 2022, for a total of two foreclosures. There were also just two foreclosures in February 2021, according to the data set, and there were six in January 2022.
In Durham County, where there are a total of 311,848 housing units analyzed by ATTOM, there were 12 foreclosures in February 2022, or 1 in every 11,338 housing units.
That’s down by 20% compared to last month, when there were 15 total foreclosures, and down by 55.6% compared to February 2021, when there were 27 total foreclosures.
Foreclosures in Durham County up 150%, in Wake County, up nearly 68%
Keeping context
“It’s very important to keep these numbers in context,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of RealtyTrac, an ATTOM company, said in a statement releasing the January 2022 report, which WRAL TechWire reported on last month.
In February 2018, the Raleigh metropolitan statistical area (MSA), which includes Wake, Johnston, and Franklin Counties, had 263 total foreclosures.
In February 2019, it had 152, and in February 2020, it had 213.
The entire MSA had 26 foreclosures in February 2021 and 70 total in February 2022, 52 of which came in Wake County.
The latest numbers aren’t an indication of economic turmoil or issues in the housing market, said Sharga in a statement issued with the release of February 2022’s report.
“It’s simply the gradual return to normal levels of foreclosure activity after two years of artificially low numbers due to government and industry efforts to protect financially-impacted homeowners from defaulting,” Sharga noted.
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