At a time when the national rate of foreclosures is at an all time high and a month where they average 0.240 percent across the nation, the state of South Carolina managed to come in at roughly one third of that at 0.092 percent. Not great compared to the 0.027 percent from the same month in 2007 but when you compare it to the 0.259 percent in Georgia, the folks here are pretty happy and proud of it.

The rate of new foreclosures here has actually dropped every month from September through the month of December. That is phenomenal compared to the rest of the country and the experts agree that they should continue to drop slowly each month or, at the very worst, stay level with the numbers from the month before.

How is it possible you ask? I mean the state of South Carolina has well over ten percent unemployment and yet they are continuing to drop in the amount of new foreclosures each month. Exactly what are they doing well that is allowing that to happen?

A lot of factors combine to make this phenomenon occur. First of all, the unemployment level is due to jobs where the people were not in danger of losing the house. They owned the property and the home on it free and clear so the only thing they would need to worry about would be keeping the utilities paid and food on the table. So the loss of a job had little to no effect on the ability to pay a mortgage since they were non-existent.

It is expected that the rate of unemployment will rise well into the double-digit range and as mentioned above, the foreclosure rate will fall. For the folks of South Carolina, that is the silver lining in the cloud.

There are a lot of wide-open spaces in the state of Montana. You can see forever, as the saying goes. In fact, if you are looking at examining the foreclosure market here, you are going to have to look almost as hard as you can and a lot harder than most other states. In

December Montana Foreclosures rate was a 0.009 percent . Yes folks, you read that right 0.009 percent. That means that during the month of December, which was a hard month for the rest of the country a total of – hang on to your hat here – 38 new properties fell into the foreclosure system in the state of Montana.

That is unheard of at a time when neighboring Idaho was getting almost 1,600 new foreclosures over the same period. We can’t say that it was due to unemployment there because the jobless rate for the same period was almost a full five and one half percent,

So what is the state of Montana doing right that the rest of the country is doing wrong?

That’s pretty simple actually. A quick check of the public records reveal that a good portion of the land in Montana is not under mortgage but rather is owned free and clear and have been paid off and privately owned for years. Couple that with the fact that Montana land owners tend to own large amounts of land as ranches and that would explain the secret.

The foreclosure crisis is almost nonexistent in the state of Montana and it is not expected to change much as the crisis continues, even if it is a long and prolonged issue, which is not expected to happen, the numbers in Montana should remain level or even drop a little due to the reasons outlined above.