A congregation losing its house of worship, once a rare event, is now common in Colorado — part of a national trend of record foreclosures on churches.
The real-estate information company CoStar Group looked at five years of distressed church sales and found only a handful of foreclosures nationwide prior to 2008, when the number jumped to 24. In 2009, the figure was 67.
CoStar Group spokeswoman Angela Brown said the market saw a big spike in 2010 with 135 churches sold after a lender-initiated foreclosure. In 2011, there were 138 such sales.
The states with the highest percentages of forced church sales often were those with some of the worst home-foreclosure rates, including California, Florida and Michigan.
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