South Carolina Foreclosures
Thursday, March 19th, 2009
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.