Foreclosures are back in the headlines. Before it turns into another round of open-house small talk, let's separate what's actually true from what's getting stretched.
Every episode of this series checks more than one source against each other before anything gets published, not just whichever number shows up first in a search. This week that meant pulling national data from ATTOM, county-level filing data from a local title company, and Maricopa County's own foreclosure numbers straight from the Cromford Report. Here's where they agree and where the headline gets ahead of the data.
FACT: Foreclosures are genuinely rising nationally.
This part isn't media hype. ATTOM Data Solutions, the industry's standard source for this kind of tracking, recorded 227,548 properties with a foreclosure filing in the first half of 2026, up 21% from a year earlier and 28% from two years ago. The first quarter alone was up 26% year over year, with bank repossessions up 45%. May came in at 40,355 filings, up 14% from the year before. Arizona shows up in the coverage too. ABC News ranked the state 10th nationally for foreclosures per ZIP code since the pandemic started, and the piece profiled a Chandler homeowner currently going through the process. The trend is real.
FICTION: Phoenix is on the same path.
The states actually driving that national number aren't us. Idaho, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, and Mississippi have posted the sharpest year-over-year increases. Maricopa County's own numbers tell a more complicated story than "foreclosures are up here too." Through September 2025, the county had 1,303 active notices of trustee sale, up 30% from the same point in 2024. That sounds alarming until you know what the 30% is measured against. Sarah Perkins, director of industry research at Navi Title Agency, put it plainly: "We are working from very low numbers. We are only a few hundred up from all-time lows." By this spring, the county had actually reversed course, posting fewer foreclosure filings than a year earlier while the national number kept climbing. For scale, Phoenix had roughly 10,558 homes in some stage of pre-foreclosure back in 2009. Nothing happening today is in the same universe.
The Cromford Report, which builds its foreclosure numbers directly from Maricopa and Pinal County trustee sale filings, backs that up from a different angle. Their most recent count put Maricopa County at 393 notices of trustee sale in a single month, roughly half of all filings statewide, and their own read on it was that the number wasn't rising and was still low for a county this size. Two different sources, pulling from two different windows of time, landing on the same basic conclusion: elevated compared to the recent bottom, but nowhere near a trend.
So the headline claim (foreclosures rising nationally) checks out. The assumption a lot of people make from it (Phoenix is next) doesn't, at least not based on the most current county-level data.
What most agents aren't saying
A lot of agents look at these numbers and call it a non-issue. On the raw math, they're not wrong. We are nowhere close to 2008. But "not 2008" and "won't matter" aren't the same thing, and here's why.
As of July, Maricopa County had roughly 15,000 active listings on the market, about a 3-month supply, and that number was still down over 4% from a year earlier. Inventory here has been thin for a long time. In a market that tight, it doesn't take a flood of distressed properties to change how a listing gets shown, priced, or negotiated. A bank-owned house two doors down starts pulling a comp differently in a 3-month supply market than it would in a 6-month supply market, where there's more room for it to get absorbed without moving the whole street's pricing.
That's the part worth watching. Not whether Phoenix is headed back to 2008, because it isn't, but whether even a moderate rise in foreclosure inventory starts showing up in comps and buyer leverage sooner than people expect, simply because there's so little cushion in the market to begin with.
What to expect going forward
Foreclosure filings lag the missed payments that caused them by several months, so what's showing up in the data now reflects decisions people made back in early 2026. The number to actually watch isn't the national headline, it's whether Maricopa County's spring reversal holds through the rest of the year or starts tracking with the national increase again. Worth pairing that with active listing counts. If inventory climbs meaningfully past that 15,000 mark at the same time foreclosure filings pick back up, that's the combination that would actually start shifting leverage toward buyers. Right now, neither of those things is happening at once.
The verdict
Foreclosures climbing nationally: fact. Phoenix repeating 2008: fiction. Foreclosure trends here being worth watching anyway: also fact, just not for the reason the headlines are selling.
Sources: ATTOM Data Solutions Mid-Year 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report; ABC News, "Foreclosures rise nationwide, data shows" (July 2026); Maricopa County trustee sale filing data via Navi Title Agency; Maricopa County foreclosure and active listing data via the Cromford Report.
