August 19 2019
Over 9,600 Vacant "Zombie" Foreclosures in the Third Quarter of 2019
IRVINE, Calif. - August 15, 2019 -- ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation's premier property database and first property data provider of Data-as-a-Service (DaaS), today released its Q3 2019 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report showing there are over 1.5 million (1,530,563) U.S. single-family homes and condos vacant in the third quarter of 2019, representing 1.6 percent of all homes.
The report analyzes publicly recorded real estate data collected by ATTOM Data Solutions — including foreclosure status, equity, and owner-occupancy status — matched against monthly updated vacancy data. (See full methodology enclosed below.)
During the third quarter of 2019, over 304,000 homes were in the process of foreclosure, with about 3.2 percent being "zombie" foreclosures. While the count of properties in the process of foreclosure is down by nearly 22 percent since ATTOM's last foreclosure vacancy report in the same period of 2016, the number that sits empty has dropped nearly in half.
"The blight of vacant, decaying properties facing foreclosure has declined dramatically across the United States – another good-news offshoot of the housing boom that's gone on for eight years," said Todd Teta, chief product officer with ATTOM Data Solutions. "A handful of areas still face notable problems with homes abandoned by owners after they get hit with foreclosure claims. But with the economy improving and the housing market still hot, an expanding number of neighborhoods across the country face little or no problem with these so-called zombie properties."
High-level findings from the report:
Report Methodology
ATTOM Data Solutions analyzed county tax assessor data for more than 98 million single-family homes and condos for vacancy, broken down by foreclosure status and, owner-occupancy status. Only metropolitan statistical areas with at least 100,000 single-family homes and condos and counties with at least 50,000 single-family homes and condos were included in the analysis. Vacancy data is available here.
About ATTOM Data Solutions
ATTOM Data Solutions provides premium property data to power products that improve transparency, innovation, efficiency and disruption in a data-driven economy. ATTOM multi-sources property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties covering 99 percent of the nation's population. A rigorous data management process involving more than 20 steps validates, standardizes and enhances the data collected by ATTOM, assigning each property record with a persistent, unique ID — the ATTOM ID. The 9TB ATTOM Data Warehouse fuels innovation in many industries including mortgage, real estate, insurance, marketing, government and more through flexible data delivery solutions that include bulk file licenses, APIs, market trends, marketing lists, match & append and introducing the first property data deliver solution, a cloud-based data platform that streamlines data management – Data-as-a-Service (DaaS).