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From USA Today:

Foreclosure sales are moving so slowly in half the states that at the current pace, it will take more than eight years on average to clear the 2.1 million homes in foreclosure or with seriously delinquent mortgages, new research shows.

That’s about twice as long as a year ago in the states where foreclosures go through courts — before the mortgage industry was upended by last fall’s disclosures that court papers in many foreclosure cases were improperly prepared. Since then, new checks have slowed the process.

The backlogs suggest that the fallout from the nation’s worst housing-market collapse is likely to weigh on real estate prices in many markets for years to come, and on some markets for longer than on others.

In New York and New Jersey, where courts imposed new rules last fall, it would take lenders more than 50 years at their current pace to clear pipelines of homes that are seriously delinquent or already in the foreclosure process, according to LPS Applied Analytics, which collects data on nearly 40 million mortgage loans.

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