The rate of borrowers 60 days or more delinquent on their mortgages dropped 23.3% in the past year, ending Q3 2013 at 4.09% from5.33% in Q3 2012of all homeowners with a mortgage according to Transunion, one of the nation’s top three credit bureaus.
All 50 states and the District of Columbia experienced a decline in their mortgage delinquency rates between Q3 2012 and Q3 2013. Five states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and Utah — experienced 30%+ declines in their mortgage delinquency rate. Three states — California, Florida and Nevada — had double-digit percentage drops in the last quarter. Nationally the mortgage delinquency rate also dropped on a quarterly basis, down 5.3% from 4.32% in Q2 2013, the seventh straight quarterly decline.
The data provided are gathered from TransUnion’s proprietary Industry Insights Report, a quarterly overview summarizing data, trends and perspectives on the U.S. consumer lending industry. The report is based on anonymized credit data from virtually every credit-active consumer in the United States.
“This isn’t a sample data set,” said Tim Martin, group vice president of U.S Housing for TransUnion’s financial services business unit. “We looked at all 52 million installment-based mortgages in the U.S. and the trend is clear — the percentage of borrowers willing and able to make their mortgage payments continues to improve. The overall delinquency rate is still high relative to ‘normal,’ but a 23% year over year improvement is great news for homeowners and their lenders.”
TransUnion recorded 52.31 million mortgage accounts as of Q3 2013, down from 54.23 million in Q3 2012. This variable was as high as 63.14 million in Q3 2008 prior to the housing crisis.
Viewed one quarter in arrears (to ensure all accounts are included in the data), new account originations increased to 2.34 million in Q2 2013, up from 2.09 million in Q2 2012. This is a major increase from just two years ago when there were 1.32 million new account originations in Q2 2010.
“New mortgage originations showed good growth through the second quarter of this year, largely the result of increased refinance transactions driven by low rates and increasing home prices,” said Martin. “However, mortgage rates started to increase right around Memorial Day, and when the data come out next quarter, we expect it to show that new originations are decreasing as a result.”