The number of Massachusetts homeowners falling behind on their mortgages showed marginal year-over-year improvement in the first quarter, according to the quarterly delinquency survey released by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).
The delinquency rate for mortgage loans on residential properties in Massachusetts was 7.46 percent at the end of the first quarter, a drop of 1.37 percent from the same time last year.
The 30-day delinquency rate in Massachusetts was 2.81 percent, 19 basis points lower than the national average of 3 percent. Massachusetts’s 90-day delinquency rate was more troubling, however, with 3.54 percent of loans 90 or more days past due, making it the 14th worst rate in the nation and just under the national average of 3.58 percent.
Nationwide, delinquency rates for mortgage loans on one-to-four-unit residential properties ticked up to a seasonally adjusted rate of 8.32 percent of all loans outstanding as of the end of the first quarter of 2011, an increase of 0.07 percent from the fourth quarter of 2010.
But the relatively flat headline number conceals a market slowly on the mend, said Jay Brinkmann, MBA’s chief economist, with delinquency rates returning to pre-recession levels in much of the country as the batch of badly-underwritten loans issued from 2005 to 2007 slowly works its way through the foreclosure process.
Still, Brinkmann warned that the national numbers were being affected by a few states with particularly high rates of delinquency and foreclosure: Florida’s 466,454 loans in foreclosure account for more than 14 percent of the loans in that state and almost 24 percent of loans in foreclosure nationwide.
Such discrepancies may be driving disparities in home prices, Brinkmann suggested, which could affect the recovery in the market depending on how many distressed properties there are in a particular area.
"If it’s a distressed loan on a property, those prices are continuing to fall; for non-distressed they’re going up. The overhang is going to differ from market to market," he said.
