Five states accounted for nearly half the total of foreclosures that occurred over the past year through April 2012, CoreLogic's national foreclosure report revealed.
In April 2012, 66,000 foreclosures took place across the country, which is down from 78,000 a year ago. Approximately 1.4 million homes, or 3.4% of all homes with a mortgage, were in the foreclosure inventory as of April.
For the last 12 months, more than 838,000 foreclosures have been finalized nationally.
But 409,000 of these foreclosures came from five states, led by California.
The Golden State completed 142,000 foreclosures in the last 12 months, followed by Florida (92,000), Michigan (60,000), Texas (58,000) and Georgia (57,000). These five states accounted for 48.8% of all completed foreclosures nationally.
The five states that had the fewest number of completed foreclosures were South Dakota (62), District of Columbia (162), North Dakota (541), West Virginia (598) and Hawaii (601).
"The inventory of homes in foreclosure in judicial states is growing, but this increase is being more than offset by declining inventories in nonjudicial states where the processing timelines to clear a foreclosure are shorter," said Anand Nallathambi, chief executive officer of Santa Ana, Calif.-based CoreLogic.
"Nationally the inventory of homes in foreclosure decreased 0.1% from what it was a year ago, and has leveled off over the first four months of 2012."
