The United States foreclosure activity has increased by two percent this past July. According to the U.S. Foreclosure Market Report for July 2014 by RealtyTrac, “foreclosure filings — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 109,434 U.S. properties in July, an increase of 2 percent from the previous month but still down 16 percent from a year ago. The report also shows one in every 1,203 U.S. housing units with a foreclosure filing during the month.” The states with the highest foreclosure rates are Florida at 1 in every 469 housing units with a foreclosure filing, Maryland at 1 in every 553, Nevada at 1 in every 639, Illinois at 1 in every 747, and Ohio at 1 in every 839, this past July.

According to Daren Blomquist, the Vice President at RealtyTrac, “July was the 46th consecutive month where U.S. foreclosure activity was down on a year-over-year basis after nearly four years of falling foreclosures, we are starting to see evidence that foreclosure numbers are normalizing at the national level. The 16 percent decrease in July was exactly half the annual decrease we saw a year ago in July 2013, when U.S. foreclosure activity was down 32 percent on a year-over-year basis.”

If we break down the current distribution of foreclosures based on the number of active foreclosure homes in the U.S, pre-foreclosures make up 29.2%, scheduled auctions make up 47.1%, and bank repossessions make up 23.7%. Compared to May 2014, the amount of new pre-foreclosure filings is down 4.9%, scheduled auctions are up 10.4%, and bank repossessions are down 3.5%. Compared to the prior year, pre-foreclosures are down 21.3%, scheduled auctions are down 3.4%, and bank repossessions are down 29.8%.