AZ 3rd-highest in foreclosures

Phoenix 7th-highest among metro areas, while Tucson is 54th-highest

staff and wire reports

Tucson, Arizona | Published: 04.30.2008

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NEW YORK — In a bad omen for sellers and lenders this spring home-selling season, the erosion of house values is accelerating and foreclosure filings are doubling, new data showed Tuesday.

A closely watched index of home prices in 20 cities fell almost 13 percent in February from a year earlier, a record for the seven-year-old S&P/Case-Shiller home-price index.

Phoenix, the only Arizona metro area included in the survey, posted a 20.8 percent decline in the price index.

The report follows news that foreclosure filings between January and March also hit a new high.

Arizona had the nation's third-highest foreclosure rate in the first quarter, while Phoenix was seventh-highest and Tucson was 54th-highest among metro areas.

"Month-to-month, it gets consistently worse," said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P, noting that February also marked the sixth straight month that all 20 cities experienced declines. "The slope is one direction. There is no sign of a bottom."

He said 17 of the metro areas that the index tracks reported record annual declines, led again by Miami and Las Vegas.

Meanwhile, U.S. home foreclosure filings continued to climb in the first quarter of 2008, jumping 23 percent over the previous quarter and more than doubling from the first quarter of 2007, according to a new report released Tuesday by RealtyTrac, a real estate data firm in Irvine, Calif.

Nevada had the highest foreclosure rate among all states, with one filing for every 54 households, or 3.6 times the national average. California logged the most filings, with 169,831.

In third-ranked Arizona, one in every 95 households received a foreclosure filing during the quarter. Foreclosure filings were reported on 27,404 Arizona properties during the quarter, up 45 percent from the previous quarter and up nearly 245 percent from the first quarter of 2007.

After the three top states, the states with the highest foreclosure rates were Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts and Connecticut.

Among 100 U.S. metro areas, Phoenix had the seventh-highest foreclosure rate, with one filing for every 70 households. The 23,135 filings were up 46 percent from fourth-quarter 2007 and a 294 percent increase from the same period a year ago.

Tucson ranked 54th, with one filing for every 224 households. The area's 1,864 filings were up 14.5 percent from the prior quarter and 90 percent from first-quarter 2007.

Metropolitan areas in California had nine of the nation's top 20 metro foreclosure rates, with Stockton and Riverside-San Bernardino topping the list at No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

Nationwide, one in every 194 households received a foreclosure filing during the quarter, more than double the same period last year.

The most recent quarter marked the seventh consecutive quarter of rising foreclosure activity.

"What would normally alleviate the foreclosure situation in a normal market is people starting to buy properties again," said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president of marketing.

However, people without perfect credit and a significant down payment are having trouble getting loans, and that is slowing the market's recovery, he said.