Foreclosure

New foreclosure filings in Arizona fell to 2,500 in September, the fewest since August 2006, according to RealtyTrac’s statistics.

“I would say that it’s on the leading edge of getting through the bulk of the foreclosure problem,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.

For the third quarter of 2013, Arizona’s average foreclosure process took 240 days to complete, Blomquist said.

Arizona’s foreclosure process was ninth-fastest among states during that period, he said, adding that Texas had the fastest foreclosure process at 164 days.

Appreciating home prices remove incentives for people to go into foreclosure, as people no longer feel their homes are worthless, said Michael Orr, director of the Real Estate Center at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business.

Although many homeowners still haven’t fully recouped equity in their homes, the market is better than it was a few years ago, he said.

“There’s still quite a lot of people who are underwater, but the number of people underwater now is about half of what is was two years ago when we were at the bottom of the market,” Orr said.

The Phoenix metropolitan area had about 1,600 new foreclosure listings in September, the lowest total since July 2006, RealtyTrac says.

The Tucson area had about 400 new foreclosure listings in September, down from nearly 1,400 from the same month the year prior, RealtyTrac’s numbers show.

The Tucson area is experiencing an increased inventory of homes on the market, said Cathy Erchull, president of the Tucson Association of Realtors.

The average home in Pima County is on the market for about four or five months, she said, adding that any longer would be a buyers’ market and any shorter would be a sellers’ market.

“When you’re looking at those kind of things, we’re more in the normal market,” Erchull said.