Delinquencies on the Decline - NYTimes.com In another sign of an improving market, mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures are down significantly since last year - although procedural impediments have tempered progress on the East Coast, especially in New York and New Jersey. The national mortgage delinquency rate - defined as borrowers at least 60 days past due on their payments - shrank by 26 percent in the second quarter, when compared with the same period in 2012, according to TransUnion, a credit information service. The delinquency rate is now 4.09 percent - still about double prerecession levels, but on a downward trend, according to Tim Martin, the group vice president for United States housing in TransUnion's financial services business unit. "We had a really good start to the year," he said. This is the third quarter in a row where we've had record improvements. Rising home prices and an improving job market are largely responsible for the turnaround. And mortgages issued in 2010 or since are performing well, which should bolster lender confidence, Mr. Martin said. In fact, a large majority of the delinquent mortgages date to 2007 or earlier. "What's causing the high rates now is people who have been delinquent for a long time," Mr. Martin said. These are folks who took out mortgages before the house prices fell and haven't been able to recover yet. Florida and Nevada have the highest delinquency rates - 9.9 and 7.7 percent. But just behind them are New Jersey, at 7.2 percent, and New York, at 5.7 percent. "They are not the worst delinquency states," Mr. Martin said, "but they've made the least progress since their peak out of other states in the country." Although neither New York nor New Jersey experienced the boom-and-bust scenario that dragged down the Florida and Nevada markets, their foreclosure timelines have been longer because of delays in the process, caused by logjams in state courts. Sam Khater, the deputy chief economist of CoreLogic, a residential property information provider, described it this way: "The real issue in New York and New Jersey is, you had a slow drip of water coming through, and the drain was plugged. Even a slow drip will build up after a while. This regional backup is also evident in foreclosure inventory levels. The three states with the biggest inventories were Florida (8.6 percent), New Jersey (6 percent) and New York (4.8 percent). Connecticut came in fourth, at 4.2 percent. But nationally, the number of homes in some stage of foreclosure had dropped off by 28 percent, to roughly 1 million, as of the end of June, according to a CoreLogic analysis. "The bulk of the foreclosure problems have shifted East from the hardest-hit sand states," Mr. Khater said. But he also notes that foreclosure levels remain two to three times higher than they were before the recession. From 2000 to 2006, completed foreclosures nationwide averaged 21,000 per month, versus 55,000 in June of this year. "While there's been rapid improvement," he said, "we're still a ways from what a normal market would look like." Mr. Martin predicted that it would take two more years for delinquency rates to reach normal levels. The rapid declines of the last several quarters will most likely slow with rising interest rates, which limits people's ability to refinance and buy homes. But the rate could still dip below 4 percent by the end of the year, he said. Essentially, the nature of the delinquent mortgages no longer looks so ominous. "People can stop getting scared off by this big number," Mr. Martin said. It's just a bubble of folks who haven't worked their way through the process.