Two thousand seven hundred and nineteen. That is how many Massachusetts homes got a foreclosure filing in the first six months of 2026, and it is up 3.23 percent from a year ago. The story ran in Banker & Tradesman in late July, built on the mid-year numbers from the property-data firm ATTOM, and the headline did what foreclosure headlines always do. It made people think 2008.
Put the number next to the size of the state and it looks different. That is 1 in every 1,115 housing units. Nationally the rate is 1 in 632, and national filings jumped 21 percent, so Massachusetts is running below the country in two ways at once. A lower rate, and a slower rise. It is also nowhere near the last crisis, when foreclosures here ran in the tens of thousands a year and whole streets in the same neighborhood went at once.
I get two kinds of calls when a headline like this runs. One is an owner who is falling behind and is scared the bank is about to take the house next week. The other is a buyer or investor who reads rising foreclosures as a coming fire sale in the towns they actually want. Both are misreading it, in opposite directions. The number is real and worth understanding. It just does not mean what either caller assumes, so here is the grounded version for both of them.
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The number, and the number it is not
Start with what is actually true. Massachusetts recorded 2,719 properties with a foreclosure filing between January and June, a filing being a default notice, a scheduled auction, or a bank repossession. That is a 3.23 percent rise over the same stretch of 2025. ATTOM CEO Rob Barber framed the national picture as “a market that is gradually returning to more typical patterns,” which is the opposite of a market falling off a cliff.
Here is the part the headline skips. Activity is up because it was pinned to the floor for years. The state’s COVID foreclosure moratorium in 2020 and 2021 froze almost all residential foreclosures, and the pipeline has been slowly refilling ever since. So yes, this is the most first-half foreclosure activity Massachusetts has seen in a while. That is a very different sentence from the most since the last crash, and the two get blurred together every time. We are climbing back toward a normal year, not sliding toward a bad one.
Why this is not 2008, in one number
The last crisis was a solvency crisis. People owed more on the mortgage than the house was worth, so when money got tight, walking away was the rational move, and it cascaded through whole neighborhoods at once. That is what made it contagious. The house being underwater was the disease.
Today is the mirror image, and one number tells the whole story. In the most recent ATTOM equity report, just 3.2 percent of mortgaged homes nationally were seriously underwater, meaning the loans against them were at least a quarter more than the home is worth. At the 2012 bottom, ATTOM’s data (then under the RealtyTrac name) put that figure near 29 percent. Almost one in three, versus about one in thirty. On the other side of the ledger, 43 percent of mortgaged homes are now equity-rich, owing half of the value or less.
That gap is the entire difference between then and now. When almost nobody is underwater, a foreclosure is not a house nobody wants at a price nobody will pay. It is a homeowner with real equity who hit a rough patch, and that changes every option on the table. It is also why the smart move for most owners in trouble today is the opposite of what it was in 2008. Back then you walked away. Now you sell, because there is something to walk away with.
So what is actually pushing people behind
ATTOM does not pin the increase on one cause. Barber talks about normalization and notes that “some homeowners may be facing greater financial strain.” My read, from what I see in Greater Boston, is that the strain is a carrying-cost squeeze, not a lending crisis. The loan itself is usually fine. It is everything stacked on top of the loan that is climbing.
Three things are doing it. First, the resets. A lot of the adjustable-rate mortgages and home-equity lines taken out in the cheap-money window of 2022 and 2023 are now repricing to higher payments, and a HELOC that was interest-only can jump hard when the draw period ends. Second, property taxes. Third, insurance, which has been climbing across the board. None of that is exotic. It is the quiet math of owning a home getting more expensive every year while the paycheck does not keep up.
Boston is the clearest example of the tax piece. The residential rate for this fiscal year rose from $11.58 to $12.40 per thousand dollars of value, and after assessments the average single-family tax bill went up about $780, roughly 13 percent in a single year, as the City Council approved the new rates in December. For an owner who was already stretched, an extra $65 a month on the tax bill on top of a HELOC reset and a higher insurance premium is exactly the kind of slow leak that ends in a missed payment.
That is a slower, narrower pressure than subprime ever was. It does not blow up a whole block at once. It tips one stretched household at a time, over months, which is exactly why the total creeps up 3 percent instead of exploding.
Where the pressure actually lands
The statewide number hides the most useful fact in the whole report, which is that foreclosure distress in Massachusetts is not spread evenly. It is concentrated, and it has been for as long as anyone has tracked it. The Massachusetts Housing Partnership’s Foreclosure Monitor, built on Warren Group petition data, puts it in sharp terms. The state’s 26 gateway cities hold about 26.7 percent of the housing units but account for 39.5 percent of the foreclosure distress, a rate roughly 48 percent above the statewide average.
Those are places like Worcester, Brockton, Lawrence, Springfield, and New Bedford, plus pockets of Hampden County out west and the South Shore. They are not the towns most of my clients are shopping. The inner-ring suburbs we work most, Newton, Brookline, Cambridge, and Arlington, sit at the low end of the distress map, for the same reasons they always have. Higher incomes, deeper equity, and a line of buyers waiting for anything that lists.
For the buyer hunting a foreclosure bargain
This is where the deal-hunters need to recalibrate. The dream is that rising foreclosures mean underpriced houses in the towns you want. In Greater Boston’s core, that wave is not coming, and the reason is the same equity we just talked about.
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When an owner in Newton or Arlington falls behind, the house almost never reaches the auction block. They have equity and a deep pool of buyers, so they list it on the open market, usually get multiple offers, pay off the loan, and keep the difference. The distress resolves as a normal sale, sometimes over asking, and you would never know from the listing that the owner was behind. The auction that a bargain-hunter is waiting for simply does not happen, because it makes no sense for the owner to let it.
Where auctions do happen, out in the gateway cities, you are not bidding against ordinary homebuyers. You are bidding against professional investors who pay cash, buy as-is with title risk and sometimes an occupant still inside, and do it without an inspection. That is a business, not a discount, and it is a rough place to learn. If you want to build a distressed-asset strategy the right way, I keep the honest version in the investment-property writing. If you want value in the core towns, the real edge is being ready to move fast and clean on ordinary inventory, which is what our buyer guidance is built around.
For the owner who is falling behind, the Massachusetts clock
Now the harder call, and the one I would rather get early. If the bills are winning and you have missed a payment or you are about to, you have more room than the headline implies, and the whole game is using it.
Massachusetts is a power-of-sale state under Chapter 244, which means most foreclosures do not go through a full court case, but the lender still has to clear real hurdles before it can sell your house. The big one is the right to cure. Before the bank can accelerate the loan and head for an auction, it has to mail you a right-to-cure notice and give you 150 days to catch up, under section 35A. That window drops to 90 days only if you ignore a loss-mitigation offer. After that come a notice of sale and three weeks of published notice before any auction. This is months, not next week.
That clock is a window, not an invitation to wait it out. Every month you carry a loan you cannot afford, the missed payments, fees, and interest eat into the equity that is yours to keep. Waiting protects nothing. It just quietly hands your cushion to the lender.
Why selling almost always beats riding it to auction
An auction is the worst possible way to turn a house into money. It sells fast, as-is, on a courthouse-step schedule, to a bidder whose only job is to clear the debt cheaply. Whatever is left after the loan payoff, the fees, and that fire-sale price is your equity, and there is usually very little of it by the time the gavel drops.
Selling on the open market before the notice ripens is the whole opposite. You control the timing, you price it at real value, you take the best offer, you pay off the loan, and the rest of the equity is yours. In a tight core-town market a clean listing in Newton or Arlington still draws several offers, so a stressed owner there is often not selling at a discount at all. They are selling into strength and simply choosing to do it before the bank forces a worse version of the same sale. A completed sale also is not a foreclosure on your credit, which matters for everything you do next.
This is the least salesy thing I will say all year. I would rather tell an owner to list early and keep their equity than watch a right-to-cure notice harden into an auction ad because nobody wanted to make the first call. If you are close in, our seller resources and the broader selling in Massachusetts writing lay out how a pre-foreclosure sale actually runs.
The move, for both sides
If you are the owner, make it early and make it boring. Call a HUD-approved housing counselor, which is free, through the national hotline at 888-995-HOPE, and read the state’s own avoiding-foreclosure page on mass.gov. Call your lender’s loss-mitigation department and ask what modification or repayment options exist. And get a straight read on what the house would net on the open market versus at auction, before the cure window runs down. The best time to make these calls is the first month you miss, not the fifth. Early, you have every option. Late, you have one.
If you are the buyer, drop the fire-sale fantasy for the towns you want and get sharp instead. The edge in Newton, Cambridge, or Arlington is not a foreclosure list, it is being pre-approved, decisive, and ready to write a clean offer the day the right normal listing hits. If you genuinely want distressed-property investing, point it at the gateway cities, bring cash and a title professional, and treat it as the business it is.
What I am actually telling people
The 2,719 number is real, and I would rather you understand it than react to it. It is a narrow, local squeeze on carrying costs, recovering toward a normal year, running slower than the rest of the country and a world away from 2008. For most owners caught in it, this is a solvable problem with real equity on their side, as long as they move while the clock is still running. For buyers, it is a reason to get sharp on the towns you actually want, not to wait for a wave that is not headed there.
If you are weighing a sale under pressure, or trying to figure out whether a distressed listing is a real deal or a trap, that is exactly the kind of call we work through with people every week. Start with our home value tool for a grounded number, or just reach out. I would rather give you a straight read now than watch you guess at a headline.
Sources
- ATTOM, Mid-Year 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report (227,548 U.S. filings, up 21%; state detail).
- Banker & Tradesman, “Foreclosures Rising in Massachusetts,” July 20, 2026 (2,719 MA filings, up 3.23%, 1 in 1,115 units).
- ATTOM via PR Newswire, “Foreclosure Activity Posts Annual Increase in First Half of 2026” (Rob Barber statement; average 563 days to foreclose, lowest since 2013).
- ATTOM, Q1 2026 U.S. Home Equity & Underwater Report (3.2% seriously underwater, 43.3% equity-rich; historical 2012 peak near 29%).
- City of Boston, FY26 Property Taxes (residential rate $11.58 to $12.40 per $1,000).
- GBH News, Boston City Council approves increased tax rates, December 11, 2025 (average single-family bill up about $780, roughly 13%).
- Massachusetts Housing Partnership, Foreclosure Monitor (gateway cities: 26.7% of units, 39.5% of foreclosure distress, rate ~48% above the state).
- Massachusetts General Laws, Chapter 244, Section 35A (150-day right to cure a mortgage default).
- Mass.gov, Avoiding Foreclosure for Massachusetts Consumers (state resources and counseling).
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