May foreclosures down in Wisconsin

Foreclosures in Wisconsin dropped 18 percent in May from the previous month and are down 16 percent from May of last year.

Daren Blomquist, Vice President of the foreclosure tracking firm RealtyTrac, says Wisconsin’s numbers continue to contrast the rest of country. “It’s interesting because Wisconsin seems to zig when the rest of the nation zags,” he says. “And the last few months before April we had been seeing increasing foreclosure activity in Wisconsin while the nation was decreasing. But in May foreclosure activity actually decreased 18 percent from April to May in Wisconsin while it increased nine percent in the nationwide.”

Blomquist says many lenders across the country are still catching up after foreclosures were slowed down due to litigation. And he says he suspects the state’s one month drop in foreclosures might not last. “If we can continue to see 18-percent decreases going forward for the next few months that will lead us to believe that maybe this is the beginning of a downward trend,” he says. “However my suspicion is that it’s probably more of a one month anomaly, because the trend so far this year has been upward in Wisconsin.”