The Lender Processing Services (LPS) reports that home loan delinquency rates in the U.S. have now exceeded 10%.  This means that for every 10 households nationwide, one has a loan at least 30 days late.  Picture it this way: there’s a late payment in at least one household on every block in the country!

Taken together with existing pre-foreclosures 13.3% of all mortgages are either delinquent or in default.  This rate translates into over 7.2 million mortgages that are behind on payments, and another 1 million properties have already been taken back by Lenders.

The new serious delinquencies (90 days or more late) between December 31, 2008 and December 2009 stood at 2.3 million of these loans.  The percentage of new serious delinquencies during 2009 grew to 4.64%, which is higher than any previous year reported by LPS’s Mortgage Monitor.

Clearly we’ve got a while to go with this foreclosure crisis.