This Is the State Where the Most People Aren’t Paying Their Mortgages

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Aug 12, 8:30AM EDT

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This Is the State Where the Most People Aren’t Paying Their Mortgages — © Simplyphotos / Getty Images

The housing market has boomed this year. People have migrated from the large coastal cities like San Francisco and New York to areas inland where prices are lower and the quality of life is believed to be better. Home sales in places like Boise have exploded. Among the reasons people can relocate are the ability to work from home and mortgage rates at historic lows.

Among the housing trends of 2021 is that few mortgages have been foreclosed on, and only a small number of people have home loans that are delinquent. Despite the surge in home prices brought on by brisk demand, middle-class and upper-class incomes have been good during the economic slump brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Banks screen loans much more carefully than they did in the housing collapse of 2007 and 2008.

Delinquent homes are not unheard of, however, although they are relatively rare. CoreLogic has just released its May Loan Performance Insights report, and most of the conclusions were good news for lenders. Dr. Frank Nothaft, chief economist for CoreLogic, commented: “The rise in home prices has built a substantial home equity cushion for homeowners with a mortgage, reducing the risk of a foreclosure.”

Another conclusion of the report is that 4.7% of home loans in May were more than 30 days delinquent or in foreclosure. The figure in the same month last year was 7.3%.
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The two states with the highest delinquency rates are very different from one another. The rates in New York and Louisiana were 5.3%. They could hardly be more distant from one another geographically or distinct in population size, median household income or level of educational attainment.

Perhaps the rates in New York are because of poorer cities like Syracuse and Buffalo. The report does not say.

Click here to see the cheapest places to buy a home.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.