Foreclosures on homes in the U.S. surged in January after a pandemic moratorium ended, though they remained well below pre-Covid levels, according to new data from RealtyTrac, Bloomberg News reported. Foreclosure filings such as default notices, scheduled auctions or bank repossessions jumped 29% from a month earlier and more than doubled compared with January 2021, the report said. Lenders repossessed 4,784 properties in the month and started the process on another 11,854 homes. “It’s very important to keep these numbers in context,” said Rick Sharga, executive vice president of RealtyTrac, a unit of real estate research firm Attom Data Solutions. “Foreclosure completions are still far below normal levels -– less than half as many as in January of 2020 before the pandemic was declared. He said that after the end of the moratorium, “we’re likely to continue seeing large year-over-year percentage increases for the rest of this year.” Measured against the total number of homes, the state with the highest foreclosure rate is New Jersey, where one in every 2,336 housing units has a filing. Nationwide, the ratio is one in 5,922. Among large cities, the worst foreclosure rates in January were in Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago.
