Here on the Summa blogs, we’ve repeatedly pointed to the foreclosure mess when assigning blame for the current housing slump, regularly observing that the huge delay in processing foreclosures has resulted in an unwillingness to buy new and non-foreclosed homes due to the price disparity, driving down overall home prices. But just how bad is the situation? Well, according to Lender Processing Services, very; although it is steadily improving.

In October, foreclosure inventories hit 4.29 percent of all active mortgages, the highest ever on record. Meanwhile, loans already in foreclosure had, on average, been delinquent for 631 days since last payment, a staggeringly high number and also an all-time record.

On the plus side, the average number of days delinquent for loans 90-or-more days past due (but not yet in foreclosure) decreased again, for the second straight month. Better yet, overall mortgage delinquencies dropped yet again, with a total loan delinquency rate of 7.93 percent in October. Total delinquencies are now almost 30 percent lower than the peak in January 2010.

The big hold-up in terms of foreclosures appears to be that states which exclusively use the judicial foreclosure process—meaning proceedings must happen in a court of law—simply aren’t equipped to deal with the huge number of foreclosures that have cropped up over the last couple of years, causing large legal bottlenecks. States that use non-judicial methods, which don’t require as much time or resources, now have half the foreclosed-home inventory percentages as judicial states do. Additionally, non-judicial states have four-to-five times the foreclosure sales rate.