Virginia Pre-Foreclosure Rates Rise Sharply Over the Year Despite Monthly Dip: A Closer Look at the Human Cost

May 2025 Sees 585 Homes in Pre-Foreclosure Across Virginia

In May 2025, 585 homes in Virginia entered pre-foreclosure, marking a troubling sign for families already grappling with rising housing and living costs. Though this figure reflects an 11.77% drop from April’s 663 cases, the year-over-year picture is more concerning: a 25.54% surge from May 2024, when the number stood at 466.

Behind this rise in pre-foreclosures is an increasingly familiar story—families earning just enough to tread water in a housing market that’s becoming progressively unforgiving. The decline from last month may hint at stabilization, but the broader trend over the past year suggests deeper structural issues that neither policy nor short-term economic recovery have yet resolved.

What the Data Reveals—and What It Leaves Out

For now, the raw numbers stop at the state level. Without granular data by county or city, it’s impossible to pinpoint where the crisis is most acute. But historical patterns and anecdotal evidence suggest that lower-income communities—particularly in the southern and southwestern parts of the state and in rapidly gentrifying suburbs around Northern Virginia—are bearing the heaviest weight.

Still, while datasets provide the headlines, it’s the lived experiences behind them that give those numbers meaning.

A Family Home, Hanging by a Thread

Monica James, a mother of three living in Chesterfield County, has worked full-time as a nurse’s aide since 2012. When interest rates rose sharply in late 2023, her adjustable-rate mortgage ticked up monthly.

“We bought this home thinking it was our forever place,” she said, scrolling through past-due notices on her phone. “I’ve never missed a payment in my life—until now.”

Monica fell one payment behind in March. Then two. By early May 2025, her lender issued a notice of default, the first step in the pre-foreclosure process.

“We’re not lazy. We’re not reckless with money,” she said. “But our wages are flat and everything else—childcare, groceries, gas—just keeps climbing.”

A Long-Term View: Echoes of the Great Recession

To understand how we got here, it helps to revisit the peaks and valleys of Virginia’s foreclosure history. In the mid-2000s, the state saw a dramatic upsurge in foreclosures as the subprime mortgage crisis unraveled. Between 2004 and 2010, annual pre-foreclosures in Virginia exploded from just 22 to a peak of 53,746.

Then came a long, slow decline. By 2019—just before the COVID-19 pandemic—pre-foreclosures had dropped to 8,016. The federal foreclosure moratorium sent those figures into freefall: just 28 cases in 2021, followed by a mere 13 in 2022. But the rebound since then has raised alarms in housing policy circles.

In 2023, Virginia saw over 10,000 pre-foreclosure filings. And even with a modest dip to 6,869 for all of 2024, the first five months of 2025 already logged 1,818—well on pace to match or exceed last year’s total.