Foreclosures mostly affect renters?

makes sense that multi families would be the leading edge of the foreclosure wave - they are often more speculative, and investor driven. Thus owners are more likely to walk away when they become money losers, unlike where the actually live.

And owner occupants of multifaimily housing tend to have less assets than single family homeowners - often they depend on income from renters to pay their mortgage.

It will move to foreclosures in wealthier areas of course, as todays article showing foreclosures are dramatically up in wealthy areas shows.

I'd love to see a blog post on that, as I think the conversation could be interesting.

By the way, kudos to Binyamin for the way this blog is currently going. It IS interesting - generally its the only thing in the Globe I read. Much improved under his hands

For the owner occupied units, I am surprised because I would expect that having income from paying tenants (more = better) would cushion the impact of rising ARM interest rates (which with the recent fed moves should be more affordable as they now readjust). .............Unless the 2nd or 3rd unit is a nonpaying family member or the multifamily is in an undesireable rental area or some of the multifamily units are in need of repair and are not habitable or the owner was never financially qualified or able to assume the cost of ownership....

This is more of a technical point than anything else but you say:

"Actually foreclosed" means repossessed by the lender. "Nearly foreclosed" means scheduled for auction.

and this is not exactly correct. Although it is very common for a lender to "buy back" a property at the foreclosure auction, it is not the rule. While large lenders and clearing house type law firms tend to take back most properties at auction, local and regional lenders, and better attorneys, look at individual assets and very often sell them to third parties at the foreclosure auction.

So "Actually foreclosed" means that the foreclosure process is complete and a sale has taken place which may mean a sale back to the lender (reposession) or may mean a sale to a third party.

As someone who specializes in this (I'm a broker and an auctioneer) I can tell you that from what I've seen multifamily prices were artificially inflated by condo conversions (or condo conversion dreams) sales prices were not driven by fundamentals (like how much rent a property could get), many of these properties are investment properties (only) so they are easier to walk away from and this is on top of ARM resets etc. and so to GB I would say your logic makes sense but unfortunately prices were illogical for quite a while and for these reasons multifamilies are taking the brunt of default.