This story was originally produced by Manchester Ink Link. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
New Hampshire’s housing crisis has sent prices skyrocketing and made it tough to find the right home, but there’s one statistic the state can take pride in – it has the lowest “zombie” vacancy rate in the nation.
A zombie vacancy is one in which the homeowner abandons the property before a foreclosure is finalized. With the absent homeowner still in charge of maintaining the property until the foreclosure is complete, the properties often deteriorate, lowering property values around them, among other issues. In some cases, banks drop the foreclosure proceeding, meaning the abandoned property continues to be an eyesore and nuisance for a long time.
Zombie vacancies make up 3.27% of foreclosures nationwide in the beginning of 2026, according to ATTOM, a leading provider of property U.S. real estate data.
New Hampshire was one of three states that had no zombie foreclosures in the first quarter of this year, according to ATTOM’s first-quarter 2026 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report. The other two were Vermont and West Virginia.
The Granite State also had the lowest overall home vacancy rate in the country, 0.03%, and the lowest vacancy rate for institutional investor-owned properties, 0.08%.
The report, which is issued during the quarter and is not a total-quarter assessment, analyzes publicly recorded real estate data, including foreclosure status, equity and owner-occupancy status and matches it against monthly updated vacancy data. It drew its New Hampshire data from Hillsborough and Rockingham counties, which comprise more than half of the state’s population as well as about 50% of single-family home property sales.
While New Hampshire homebuyers know the drawbacks to a low vacancy rate, it also has some positives, said Rob Barber, CEO of ATTOM.
“It will come as no surprise to anyone shopping for a home that vacancy rates remain low. That is one reason home prices have continued to rise despite ongoing affordability challenges,” Barber said in the report. “It is also encouraging for both neighborhoods and the broader market that even among properties in foreclosure, vacancy rates remain relatively low.”
New Hampshire also ranked 41st in foreclosure rate, according to ATTOM’s January foreclosure report. The state had 87 foreclosure filings in January, which was 1 for every 7,454 housing units, according to ATTOM data. The national rate was 1 for every 3,547. The numbers include properties that are in default and notice of default, in notice of foreclosure, as well as those that have been foreclosed on and are now bank-owned.
New Hampshire’s 0.3% vacancy rate was followed by Vermont (0.4%), New Jersey (0.5%), Connecticut (0.5%) and Idaho (0.6%).
Overall, 1.33% of residential properties in the United States, or nearly 1.4 million homes, were vacant at the beginning of the year, the report says.
Some 230,401 properties of the 104.8 million in the U.S. were in the process of foreclosure at the time of the report. Of those, 7,540, or 3.27%, were “zombies.” That zombie rate was essentially the same as the prior quarter, but down slightly from 3.34 percent at the same time last year.
The states with the highest overall home vacancy rates are Oklahoma (2.4%), Kansas (2.4%), Alabama (2.2%), Missouri (2.1%) and West Virginia (2.1%).
Of the 27 metropolitan statistical areas with sufficient data to analyze, meaning they had at least 100,000 total residential properties and 50 or more properties in the foreclosure process that are vacant, the highest zombie rates were in Cleveland, Ohio, at 9.9%; Baltimore, at 9.3%; St. Louis, at 8.6%; Akron, Ohio, 7.4%; and Indianapolis, 6.5%.
The metro areas with the lowest zombie foreclosure rates were New York City, 1.6%; Philadelphia, 1.7%; Los Angeles, 2.2%; Orlando, 2.2% and Lakeland, Florida, 2.4%.
An issue that New Hampshire hasn’t seen a lot of is that of institutional investors – corporations that buy up homes and rent them out to people who can’t afford to buy in the market. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development defines institutional investors with a nationwide portfolio of 1,000 homes or more.
According to the ATTOM report, these properties are also more likely to be vacant, with a 3.5% vacancy rate for the 25.2 million institutional investor-owned homes in the U.S.
After New Hampshire’s 0.8% in institutional investor-owned property vacancies, the other lowest states were Vermont (1%), Idaho (1.3%), North Dakota (1.5%) and Maine (1.5%). While the report doesn’t include figures for numbers of institutional investor-owned homes by state, most are in the Southeastern states and Texas, with about 0.2% in the Northeast.
The states with the highest vacancy rates for investor-owned properties were Indiana (7.2%), Illinois (6.2%), Alabama (6%), Kansas (6%) and Oklahoma (5.9%).
