Almost always no. Check the raw numbers behind the headline instead of the adjective in it. "Up sharply" is a percentage-change phrase, and a percentage change off a near-zero base is still near zero. A delinquency rate can jump a big-sounding percentage month over month and remain below where it sat before the pandemic. "Serious" delinquency also has a specific definition: 90-plus days past due, a small, late-stage slice rather than everyone a few days behind. The pre-foreclosure claims usually collapse first. When we actually pulled the data for Orange County, a county with on the order of 965,000 single-family homes, the count of active foreclosures came back in the single digits. Filtering Zillow for pre-foreclosure returned essentially nothing, and a broader distressed-and-owner filter turned up only a few hundred properties, a fraction of one percent of the housing stock. Nowhere near a claimed 10 to 20 percent. One more distinction: a Zillow pre-foreclosure tag or a notice of default does not mean the home will foreclose. Plenty of those owners bring the loan current or sell first, especially when they hold equity. When an alarming headline crosses your feed, check three things: the base the percentage is measured from, the actual count, and whether "pre-foreclosure" is being treated as a completed foreclosure. The scary version rarely survives that check.