Illinois Mortgage Defaults Rise Along with Rest of Country

Foreclosures and late Illinois mortgage payments are hitting high marks in Will County and across the country.

In Will County, foreclosures in 2006 reached 3,226, the highest in at least four years and a 30 percent jump from the number of foreclosures in 2005, according to information from the Recorder of Deeds office.

The Mortgage Bankers Association said Tuesday that the number of late mortgage payments nationwide hit a 3½-year high of 4.97 percent in the final quarter of 2006. Also, the percentage of mortgages going into the foreclosure process reached a record high of 0.54 percent.

In Will County, the number of households in foreclosure in January was one in every 311, according to RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based company that monitors foreclosures. The county had the highest foreclosure rate in the Chicago housing market for most of 2006 and again in January.

The rising foreclosure rates have been fueled by subprime loans that pumped up the real estate market in recent years, making mortgages available to borrowers with high credit risks.

“A lot of these programs, quite honestly, instead of helping people have really hurt them,” said Tom Mulvey, vice president at Dow Mortgage, a Joliet company that does not deal in subprime loans.

Mulvey predicted the number of foreclosures would keep rising.

In January, Will County home loans reached 363, the highest number in at least 13 months, according to the Recorder of Deeds office.

RealtyTrac’s report on January foreclosures showed Grundy County with a rate of one for every 519 households and Kendall County with a rate of one for every 476 households. While those rates were better than in Will County, they still were much higher than the national average of one for every 886 households.

All Chicago-area counties had higher foreclosure rates than the national average, and only DeKalb and DuPage counties had better rates than the Illinois average of one for every 637 households, according to RealtyTrac.

Doug Duncan, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association, suggested that homeowners having difficulties making payments contact a home loan lender as soon as possible.

“It is in everyone’s interest to keep the homeowner in their home paying their bills on time,” Duncan said.

SOURCE: The Herald News