Fewer new problem loans, declining levels of negative equity and shrinking inventories of bad loans from the boom era have helped to reduce mortgage delinquencies by the largest year-to-date decline since 2002.

The May Mortgage Monitor report from Lender Processing Services found that the national delinquency rate continued to fall in May, Delinquencies are down more than 15 percent since the end of December 2012, coming in at 6.08 percent for the month.

As LPS Applied Analytics Senior Vice President Herb Blecher explained, much of this improvement is supported by the fact that new problem loan rates are approaching the pre-crisis average. “Though they are still approximately 1.4 times what they were, on average, during the 1995 to 2005 period, delinquencies have come down significantly from their January 2010 peak,” Blecher said. “In large part, this is due to the continuing decline in new problem loans — as fewer problem loans are coming into the system, the existing inventories are working their way through the pipeline. New problem loan rates are now at just 0.73 percent, which is right about on par with the annual averages during 2005 and 2006, and extremely close to the 0.55 percent average for the 2000-2004 period preceding.

“As we’ve noted before,” Blecher continued, “negative equity appears to still be one of the strongest drivers of new problem loans, and — primarily buoyed by home price increases nationwide — that situation also continues to improve. We looked once again at the number of ‘underwater’ loans in the U.S., and found that the total share of mortgages with LTVs of greater than 100 percent had declined to just 7.3 million loans as of the end of the first quarter of 2013. This accounts for less than 15 percent of all currently active loans and represents a nearly 50 percent year-over-year decline.”

Though recent volatility in mortgage loan interest rates are not yet reflected in the data, the Mortgage Monitor did show that 2013 origination activity remained strong through April, with that month’s 835,000 new loans representing a 1.8 percent increase from March and a 34.1 percent growth from the prior year. The May data also showed an increase in prepayment rates, indicating that refinance activity, and likely associated originations, remained strong despite that month’s increased interest rates. LPS will continue to monitor the data to see what impact rate increases may have on originations in the months to come.

As reported in LPS’ First Look release, other key results from LPS’ latest Mortgage Monitor report include:

Total U.S. loan delinquency rate: 5.08%

Month-over-month change in delinquency rate: -2.11%

Total U.S. foreclosure presale inventory rate: 3.05%

Month-over-month change in foreclosure pre-sale inventory rate:-3.91%

States with highest percentage of non-current* loans: FL, NJ, MS, NV, NY

States with the lowest percentage of non-current* loans: MT, AK, WY, SD, ND

*Non-current totals combine foreclosures and delinquencies as a percent of active loans in that state.