Texas had the second-most foreclosure starts in the nation during August 2021, according to new data from ATTOM’s U.S. Foreclosure Market Report. Lenders began the foreclosure process on 1,060 Texas homes last month, preceded only by California with 1,240 foreclosure starts. Ranking after Texas is Florida with 643 foreclosure starts, then Illinois with 506 and New York with 479.

ATTOM is the parent company of the online foreclosure marketplace RealtyTrac.com. To compile these national figures, the ATTOM Data Warehouse considered the foreclosure filings entered into that database from the past quarter. The data was collected from more than 3,000 counties nationwide, accounting for more than 99% of the U.S. population.

Of the major metro areas (with populations over 1 million) studied by ATTOM, the greatest number of foreclosure starts occurred in New York City: 486. This was closely followed by Chicago with 439, Los Angeles with 401, then the Texas cities of Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, with 322 and 248 foreclosure starts, respectively.

Across the U.S. in August, lenders began the foreclosure process on 8,348 total properties: a 27% increase from previous month and a 49% increase from 2020. In that time, lenders also completed repossessing a total of 2,474 properties through REOs (real estate owned properties): up 2% from July and up 22% from last year.

In all, the percentage of completed foreclosures increased most in New York, up 136%; Michigan, up 62%; Illinois, up 24%; Florida, up 19% ;and Texas, up 13%.

Although these statistics may appear troublesome, Rick Sharga, the executive vice president at RealtyTrac, urges Americans to keep these numbers in context. “Both last year’s and last month’s foreclosure starts were artificially low due to the government’s moratorium. But in August of 2019, the last year we had ‘normal’ foreclosure activity, there were almost 28,000 foreclosure starts – over three times more than this year,” Sharga said.