Cook County Foreclosures Slowed in August

Lenders cooled off starting new Cook County foreclosure lawsuits in August, even though Illinois retained a top spot nationwide for having nearly the most such court cases initiated against real estate owners.

Foreclosure proceedings declined for the third consecutive month in Cook County. Lenders started 491 foreclosure court proceedings in August, down from 504 in July and 747 in June, public records show. The total value of the mortgage loans underlying August’s newly started foreclosures is $363 million, according to The Real Deal’s analysis of public property and court data.

Here’s where Cook County foreclosure court cases began in August:

Leaflet map created by Adam Farence | Data by © OpenStreetMap, under ODbl.

The median foreclosure amount was $165,000 for August. By comparison, the median foreclosure amounts for May, June and July were $172,000, $166,500 and $161,947, respectively.

U.S. Bank, once again, claimed the top spot for making the most frequent foreclosure filings, with 64 notices filed in August. It’s still a decline from July, when U.S. Bank filed 82 notices, and much lower than March’s total of 165.

Skokie-based American Landmark Properties is the borrower of the biggest loan to become subject of a foreclosure lawsuit in August, weighing in at $96 million as lender Prime Finance looks to take the keys to the 20-story, 890,000-square-foot suburban office campus called Schaumburg Towers at 1400 and 1450 American Lane.

During May, June and July, Adventus Realty Trust, a Canadian firm with significant Chicago-area office holdings, faced the highest foreclosure amount at $114 million as a special servicer of the debt package for the four-building, 870,000-square-foot Riverway office complex near O’Hare International Airport works to take over that property.

Nationwide, new foreclosure filings jumped seven percent from July to August, but declined by two percent when compared to August of last year, according to Irvine, California-based real estate data firm ATTOM.

Despite the nationwide decline, Illinois once again is cited in ATTOM’s data as an area with the second-largest proportion of its housing units facing foreclosures in the country, where one out of 2,433 housing units faced foreclosure. The nationwide average is one out of 4,113 housing units being in foreclosure.