NHBR: NH mortgage delinquency rates up

Cindy Kibbe over at the New Hampshire Business Review has an update on the mortgage delinquency rate in NH.

Ms. Kibbe's report goes on to note that while the delinquency rate in NH is up, our 3.76% rate is much lower than the 5.81% national rate. In fact, NH is ranked 37th in the country, meaning that only 13 states have lower delinquency rates. Nevada and Florida have the highest delinquency rates in the country at 13.8% and 12.3% respectively.

In New England, only Vermont has a lower delinquency rate than New Hampshire. A recent Wall Street Journal report (subscription only) on mortgage regulations in Vermont may help explain why Vermont has such a low delinquency rate, hovering around 2.51%.

Finally, this recent post by The Economist's View blog has some excepts from the WSJ article and does some interesting analysis on it as well. While the WSJ report suggests that Vermont's prudence in the mortgage market was a serious buzz-kill during the boom that restricted their economic growth, The Economist's View seems unconvinced:

The tenor of the article is that Vermont has overregulated the mortgage market preventing…wait for it…the unforgivable error of restricting loans to those who can prove an ability to repay. Worse yet, consumers receive explicit notice of high rates and brokers are held accountable.
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The insanity. The horror. Encourage personal responsibility? Hold people accountable for their behavior? Unthinkable.
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