About 96 percent more Colorado homes entered the foreclosure process in November than the month before, signaling a break in the backlog of cases that stacked up during fraud investigations of big foreclosure law firms, according to RealtyTrac.
RealtyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist said 842 properties entered the foreclosure process last month, up from 429 in October.
The number of completed foreclosures in Colorado increased 60.6 percent to 1,049 in November from 653 in October. In metro Denver, the number rose 79.5 percent to 447 from 249.
This bucked the national trend that saw completed foreclosures decrease 9 percent from October to November
Blomquist said many of the foreclosure starts were the result of enforcement actions by state Attorney General John Suthers that resulted agreeing to pay more than $1.7 million
to settle claims that they intentionally .
As a result, the targeted law firms have transferred their foreclosure cases to new attorneys, which has caused delays and resulted in the new firms playing catch-up, he said.
“That (96.2 percent) is obviously an eye-popping number,” Blomquist said, adding that the situation is unique to Colorado.
“We have seen a lot of volatility month to month. In July, there was a 154 percent increase in those foreclosure starts compared to June in Colorado,” he said. “There was a big drop-off in September and October, but then there was a spike in November.”
The Colorado figures, he said, are a sign of the “dysfunction in the foreclosure industry in Colorado and the lawsuits that are trying to address the dysfunction.”
For the first 11 months of the year, 9,772 Colorado properties have been scheduled for foreclosure auction, compared with 10,738 in the same period of 2013.
But Blomquist said he is not minimizing the spike in filings last month.
“We are catching up with some of those foreclosures that never got filed that should have been filed,” he said. “Certainly, those 842 starts in November are real foreclosure notices — those are people who, in the next few months, could be losing their homes.”
Howard Pankratz: 303-954-1939, hpankratz@denverpost.com or twitter.com/ howardpankratz
