CoreLogic is reporting that foreclosures last month totaled 66,000, down 12,000 or 15.4 percent from April 2011 but unchanged from March 2012. There have been approximately 3.6 million completed foreclosures in the US since the financial crisis began in September 2008.  That number is for legal actions where the bank took possession of the property and does not include the numbers of homes surrendered through short sales or deeds-in-lieu of foreclosure.

The national foreclosure inventory in April contained 1.4 million homes or 3.4 percent of all homes in the country with a mortgage.  This was unchanged from the previous month but was down .1 million or 0.1 percent from April 2011.  CoreLogic defines foreclosure inventory as the number and share of mortgage homes that have been placed into the process of foreclosure by the mortgage servicer.

 "There were more than 830,000 completed foreclosures over the past year or, in other words, one completed foreclosure for every 622 mortgaged homes," said Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic. "Non-judicial foreclosure markets, like Nevada, Arizona and California, completed two and a half times as many foreclosures over the past year as judicial foreclosure states.

 "The inventory of homes in foreclosure in judicial foreclosure states is growing, but this increase is being more than offset by declining inventories in non-judicial states where the processing timelines to clear a foreclosure are shorter," said Anand Nallathambi, chief executive officer of CoreLogic. "Nationally the inventory of homes in foreclosure decreased 0.1% from what it was a year ago at this time, and has leveled off over the first four months of 2012."

 Completed foreclosures over the last five months were highest in California (142,000), Florida (92,000), and Michigan (60,000).  The highest inventories of pending foreclosures as a percentage of all mortgaged homes were in Florida (12.0 percent), New Jersey (6.7 percent), and Illinois (5.3 percent.)  Nevada, in fourth place at 5.0 percent was the only non-judicial foreclosure state out of the 12 jurisdictions with the highest inventories.