This data includes filings related to mortgage foreclosure in Allegheny County. The foreclosure process enables a lender to take possession of a property due to an owner's failure to make mortgage payments. Mortgage foreclosure differs from tax foreclosure, which is a process enabling local governments to take possession of a property if the owner fails to pay property taxes.

As Pennsylvania is a judicial foreclosure state, a lender files for foreclosure through the court system. Foreclosure data in the court system is maintained by the Allegheny County Department of Court Records. Data included here is from the general docket, and a mortgage foreclosure docket created to help homeowners maintain ownership of their property following an initial filing. Several different types of legal filings may occur on a property involved in the foreclosure process. At this time, only the most recent filing in a case is included in the data found here, but we hope to add all filings for a case in the coming months.

After a property enters the foreclosure process, several potential outcomes are possible. Some of the more common outcomes include: borrowers may come to an agreement with the lender for unpaid debt; borrowers may sell the property to satisfy part or all of the debt; borrowers may voluntarily relinquish ownership to the lender; lenders may decide not to pursue the foreclosure any further; and the property may proceed all the way through a sheriff sale, where it is sold to a new owner.

Before September 2022, the data presented here included only the final filing for the month in which each case (represented by Case ID) is opened; since then the feed has changed so we now have a new last_activity field, which gets updated whenever there is a new filing in the case with the date of the last filing for the month. The last_activity value gives some indication of which cases are still ongoing. (However, the new feed does not include the docket_type field, so these are blank for cases started after August 2022.) To view the detailed mortgage foreclosure filings for each property represented in this dataset, please visit the Department of Court Records Website, and enter the Case ID for a property to pull-up detailed information about each foreclosure case, including parties, docket entries, and services.

CHANGELOG

2022-12-14: Loaded data back to September (which had been missing due to the schema migration). Added a new last_activity field. Data since September 2022 is missing the docket_type value, for now those new values will be set to '' (empty string).