Dallas-Fort Worth Late Mortgages Totals Down From Summer
The number of Dallas-Fort Worth homeowners who are behind on their mortgage payments has fallen since this summer. But still that’s almost twice the share of folks late with their home loan payments compared with a year ago, according to a new report from CoreLogic. More than 7% of D-FW homeowners with a loan had missed at least one payment in September. That’s up from 3.8% a year earlier. The local mortgage delinquency rate has fallen from this summer, when more than 8% of home mortgage holders had missed at least one payment.
Nationwide, CoreLogic researchers are seeing the same trend toward lower delinquencies from a few months ago during the worst of the impact of the pandemic. Across the country, 6.3% of home mortgage holders had missed at least one payment in September.
“Although delinquencies remain high, it’s clear the economy has passed an initial stress test,” Frank Martell, president and CEO of CoreLogic, said in the report. “High home equity balances and structural protections put in place as a result of the Great Recession contributed to surviving this test. Housing demand remains strong, and rates low, which provides optimism that the housing market will continue to be a bright spot in this COVID-ravaged economy.”
The late loan totals include millions of homeowners who took federal mortgage payment deferrals at the start of the pandemic.
Among Texas’ major metro areas, Houston has the highest mortgage delinquencies at 8.9%, CoreLogic found. In San Antonio, 8.3% of homeowners with a loan had missed one payment or more. And in the Austin area, only 5.3% of mortgage holders were behind. With federal moratoriums on most home lender actions, home foreclosures in Texas and nationwide remain low.
In the D-FW area, only 0.2% of home mortgages were in foreclosure in September — unchanged from a year earlier. Houston had the state’s largest big-city home foreclosure rate at 0.4%. With mortgage rates at record lows, millions of U.S. homeowners have refinanced their properties to reduce monthly payments or tap funds...
