Foreclosures declined nationally in November

Foreclosures dropped 23% in November from the same month in 2011, a new report shows, indicating housing continues to mend.

The Santa Ana mortgage-tracking firm CoreLogic said Thursday that 55,000 homes were foreclosed on nationally in November, down from 72,000 in October. Completed foreclosures declined 6% from October’s 59,000 tally.

Since the start of the financial crisis in September 2008, about 4 million foreclosures have been completed across the U.S., CoreLogic said. About 1.2 million homes, or about 3% of houses with a mortgage, were in some stage of the foreclosure process in November. That was a decline of about 18% from November 2011.

“We still have a long way to go to return to historic norms, but this trend is firmly in the right direction,” CoreLogic Chief Executive Anand Nallathambi said in a news release.

The firm attributed the drop in foreclosures, in part, to the increased use of the short sale process by banks to avoid foreclosure. In a short sale, a lender allows a home to be sold for less than the outstanding debt on the property.

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