Foreclosures are speeding up again. For three straight months through December, foreclosure activity had declined as banks worked to refine their procedures and documentation. In January, however, foreclosure activity increased by 1.4%, according to foreclosure tracker RealtyTrac. The delays might not be completely over yet, but they may be starting to abate.

Bank repossessions drove the increase in activity, up by 11.9%. At 78,133, they were the highest since October. Yet default notices and auctions both continued to decline in January, down 0.7% and 3.7%, respectively. So the increase in seizures was large enough to overshadow the declines in the other two stages of foreclosures.

This can be seen pretty clearly through the following chart, which tracks some history of the RealtyTrac data:

You can see that, although there was a big spike in bank repos in January, they still remain far below their September peak. For default notices and auctions, however, it looks like their declines are about set to reverse course, as their curves are flattening.

The stacked bar chart provides another way to look at the numbers:

Through this, you can see the increase in total foreclosure activity. As the chart shows, it's nearly back up to its November level, but still much lower than it was during the months leading into October. As banks continue to work through the foreclosure inventory they delayed over the past several months, we should start to see these numbers begin to rise faster.