Dive Brief:

• Foreclosure activity, including properties with default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions, was up 7% last month and 14% over July 2014, RealtyTrac reported this week.

• July marked the fifth consecutive month of year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity — after 53 consecutive months of decreases.

• Despite the July uptick, however, foreclosure starts were at their lowest level since November 2005, RealtyTrac said.

Dive Insight:

The increase in foreclosure activity over the past five months was due largely to bank repossessions, which RealtyTrac Vice President Daren Blomquist said are “rapidly rising.”

In fact, bank repossessions, which are the final stage of the foreclosure process, reached their highest level in July since January 2013.

But those repos, Blomquist said, were largely of properties that had been in the foreclosure pipeline for a long time rather than of homes just entering the process.

In fact, the report said properties foreclosed on during the second quarter had been in the process for an average of 629 days — the longest of any quarter since 2007, when RealtyTrac began monitoring foreclosures. 

Blomquist called July’s activity a “clearing out of more of the bad bubble-era loans." 61% of loans still in the foreclosure process originated between 2004 and 2008, during and after the housing bubble.