Since Bank of America first announced they would be freezing foreclosures nationally 9 weeks ago, we've seen a dramatic drop in foreclosure activity within our coverage area. It wasn't unusual to see more than a thousand foreclosure sales a week where BofA was identified as the beneficiary on the foreclosure notice prior to the freeze. With the freeze in place that dropped to less than a couple dozen a week... until this week. While still at 20 percent of their prior volume they are clearly back in business. The Wall Street Journal confirmed this measured approach, and from the article, it doesn't sound like they'll be back to typical levels until "early next year". That makes perfect sense given the holidays. The remaining mystery is why they stopped in Arizona, California, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington (ForeclosureRadar's coverage area) at all. The Wall Street Journal article repeatedly talks about problems in the affidavit filing process, but that only applies to the judicial foreclosure process, which none of the states we cover commonly use. BofA's own announcement also didn't say anything specific about the non-judicial states. Not clear that we'll ever know if they actually had some documentation problems in the non-judicial states as well, or simply stopped foreclosures everywhere in an abundance of caution.
