High Foreclosure Rates Spread into New Metro Areas

It comes as no surprise that metro areas like Las Vegas, Nev. and Fort Myers, Fla. had the highest foreclosure rates in the country—they've been high for some time.

Foreclosed Home

But high foreclosure rates are now moving into metro areas that previously avoided the problem, according to a new report from RealtyTrac, an online foreclosure marketplace.

“Rising unemployment and a new variety of mortgage resets continued to gradually shift the nation’s foreclosure epicenters in the third quarter away from the hot spots of the last two years and toward some metro areas that had avoided the brunt of the first foreclosure wave,” said James J. Saccacio the chief executive officer of RealtyTrac in a statement.

Among those new hot spots were Boise City-Nampa, Idaho which saw a 142 percent increase in foreclosures in the third quarter compared with the same period a year ago. Other new foreclosure hot spots include Provo-Orem (120 percent increase) and Salt Lake City (105 percent increase) metro areas, both of which are in Utah.

And in California, the Chico metro area saw a 98 percent increase in its foreclosure rate during the third quarter, the largest year-over-year increase in the state.

Leading the nation was the Las Vegas-Paradise, Nev. metro area, where one in every 20 households received a foreclosure notice in the third quarter. Foreclosure notices are defined as a default notice, bank repossession or auction sale notice.

Following Las Vegas-Paradise in the top five were Merced, Calif., Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Fla., Stockton, Calif., and Modesto, Calif.

The metro area with the lowest foreclosure rate in the country was Utica-Rome, N.Y., where one in every 5,441 households received a foreclosure notice.

To see which states ranked in the top ten, click here.