TRI-STATE — Every day so far this year, on average, at least one family, business owner or landlord has lost ownership of property in Washington County.

The large foreclosure notices in the back section of the daily newspaper have become so common, you almost can forget they affect real people.

Now, new figures show the toll of the ongoing recession in neighborhoods throughout the Tri-State area.

In Washington County alone, the number of properties sold at the courthouse or taken back by lenders since Jan. 1 reached 319 last week — 44 percent more than in the same period a year ago.

Put it this way: Sunday is the 228th day of 2009 and already this year, 319 properties have been lost to foreclosure. Most of them have been people’s homes.

The situation is even worse in some other areas of the region.

Consider:

• In Berkeley County, W.Va., the number of foreclosure sales jumped 70 percent to 480 properties lost so far this year.

• In Jefferson County, W.Va., a total of 574 properties, a 29 percent increase, have been lost thus far this year.

• In Franklin County, Pa., while exact numbers aren’t available, indications are that foreclosure sales are up there, too.

Part of the reason for this year’s surge appears to be the region’s continuing high unemployment rates.

Nearly double last year’s rates, the jobless rates for June, the most recent month for which figures were available, were 10.5 percent in Washington County, 10 percent in Berkeley County, 8.3 percent in Jefferson County, 9.9 percent in Morgan County, W.Va., 8.4 percent in Franklin County and 15 percent in Fulton County, Pa.

“Something that was not the case two years ago are the job losses,” said Sharon Disque, executive director of the Hagerstown Neighborhood Development Partnership Inc.

“So now, we’re seeing the loss of income, plus the loss of the value of the home, so people will be upside-down,” meaning they now owe more than their property is worth, Disque said.

“It’s a sad situation,” said Sandy Barron, chief deputy in the Berkeley County Clerk’s Office, which posts foreclosure notices for residents who come in to check their cases. “Like I said, with the economy like it is and people losing their jobs, I know it’s rough. You try to help them. Sometimes, it’s kind of hard to explain what they’re going through. I know it would be hard for me.”

The wave of foreclosures doesn’t seem to be cresting anywhere in the area except, perhaps, Franklin and Fulton counties.

In Franklin County, a court clerk there said, lenders have filed for a total of 290 foreclosures thus far this year. She said 288 were filed in the same period a year ago.

That pales in comparison to the growing number of cases being filed in Washington County.

So far this year at the courthouse in Hagerstown, lenders have started 593 foreclosure procedures — nearly double the 318 they initiated in that period a year ago.

Disque said she is seeing signs of the growing trouble.

“June was the highest we’ve seen,” both in the number of foreclosures and their total value, she said.

A growing caseload

Disque’s independent, nonprofit organization has seen the situation worsening, especially since spring.

Through its Hagerstown Home Store program, the work of her downtown Hagerstown office includes counseling families facing foreclosure, as well as helping first-time home buyers.

As the numbers have increased, the office hired a second housing counselor so one of them could work most of the time with the families in financial trouble, Disque said.

“And even with that, at times, we’re looking at a three- to four-week wait even to get foreclosure clients in,” she said. A year or so ago, it was “a one- to two-week wait,” she said.

Her office also has been tracking the number of cases in which people lose their foreclosure cases — and their properties.

The process often takes several months because after a lender files a case, it can be delayed while negotiations continue or bankruptcy is sought.

In January, for instance, 29 foreclosure properties in Washington County were sold, according to Disque’s records. Such properties usually are bought back by the lender because private buyers at such auctions are scarce.

There were 22 sales in February, 25 in March, 31 in April, 36 in May and — the highest yet — 55 in June. Disque didn’t have figures yet for July.

“There was only one month in ’08 where we broke 30 and that was June of ’08,” when the number hit 32, Disque said. So the growing numbers this past April, May and June appear to be another sign the situation is worsening.

Another way of tracking this is to look at the value of the properties homeowners are losing, she said.

In June, that value surged to $12.3 million — nearly twice the value of those sold in May and more than double the value of those sold in June 2008, according to a tracking company Disque uses.

The figures include another surprise: Apparently, many of the properties being lost are much more modest than the pricey mega-bedroom houses some had been building here.

“Some people thought these were expensive properties, but the reality is, the median is not that high,” Disque said. For June, it was $170,876.

“There was one with a $600,000 value, but, for the most part, it’s the low end of the market,” she said. “It’s people who purchased their first or only home.”

An ongoing process

For the people who work in the courthouses and sheriff’s offices that process all of these cases, it’s been an unending and, seemingly still rising, mountain of paperwork.

“I don’t even know how many we’ve had this year because the cases get continued,” said Fulton County Sheriff Department’s Deputy Nancy Suders, whose office delivers foreclosure notices to property owners. “On TV, it looks like the sheriff shows up, throws ’em out and that’s it. It really isn’t that easy. In Pennsylvania, it’s a process.”

Attorneys for lenders or homeowners “don’t tell us why it gets continued. They just want another (sale) date,” she said.

Sometimes, the delays stretch out for several months, said Norma Sappington, deputy clerk at the Washington County Clerk of Court’s office in Hagerstown.

“Some of them are really long because they (lenders) allow the person to try to get it out of default and they’ll just give them time,” Sappington said. “They just try to let it lay. What’s happening now is, the longer they let it lay, they (borrowers) file in bankruptcy. See, we’ve got a lot of foreclosures in bankruptcy.”

There at least, however, the numbers don’t appear to be increasing.

According to Sappington’s count, 50 borrowers from Washington County have filed in federal court for bankruptcy protection thus far this year, staving off foreclosures. In the same period a year ago, 47 filed for bankruptcy protection in the face of foreclosure threats, she said.

Contrary to what one might think, most people who have gotten so far behind in their mortgage payments aren’t bad people, Suders said.

“Everybody is not a deadbeat,” Suders said. “People lose their houses for one reason or another and it’s not because they don’t want to pay it. Most everybody’s a hard-working individual.

“Now, some people, well, if you watch ‘Home and Garden’ on TV ... I watch it. I see people with a $2,000-a-month mortgage. Well, better neither one better never get sick.

“Or people buy who plan to get married. Well, one skedaddles and, well, that isn’t going to work.”

Trying to keep track

Just the matter of counting foreclosure cases is difficult.

In West Virginia, the revelation by a large newspaper downstate that a national foreclosure reporting service was “undercounting” the number there triggered action as high up as the state Legislature.

Robert Lamont, attorney for the state Division of Banking, said such news stories “totally debunked” the service, which he said admitted it didn’t have complete records for rural states such as West Virginia.

That finding was important because “we also saw some reports where federal funds are contingent on foreclosure rates ... so a state might get shortchanged on (federal) neighborhood stabilization funds” and other money, Lamont said.

Knowing that and wanting to know how big a problem foreclosures are in West Virginia, he said, legislators voted this year to require a precise reporting from the lenders, to county clerks, to the state.

In addition, Lamont said, his agency began a survey of records throughout the state.

The results, released last week, show 2,577 properties were sold from January through December of last year as the result of mortgage foreclosures. That was 12 percent higher than the number sold in 2007, the agency said.

“Significant increases in counties such as Berkeley and Jefferson more than offset decreases in other populous counties such as Cabell and Kanawha in the years examined,” the agency said in a press release.

With 519 foreclosure sales, Berkeley County led the state in 2008. With 225, Jefferson County was third highest, behind Kanawha County, which dropped to 256. Morgan County was far down the list, with 45.

In Pennsylvania, the exact numbers of cases are clouded by those that get bumped from sale to sale to sale.

A woman who monitors the so-called sheriff’s sales for foreclosures in Franklin County offered numbers for various ways a case could be continued or scheduled.

Using just two of those categories — “new” cases and “continued” ones set for sale in a given month — showed a total of 612 properties have been scheduled for sale through September this year versus 438 a year ago. It wasn’t clear how many of those cases actually went to sale, however.

Foreclosure can come as a surprise

CHARLES TOWN, W.Va. — Jefferson County Clerk Jennifer Maghan knows firsthand one of the behind-the-scenes problems created when a rental property goes into foreclosure.

In May, when Maghan was renting a house, a co-worker told her startling news: “Well, the house you’re renting is being foreclosed on,” Maghan recalled last week.

“I didn’t even know it,” she said, adding she’d had fewer than 30 days to find another place.

The incident shows the need of the foreclosure “trustee’s sale” dates listed on her office’s Web site at www.jeffersoncountyclerkwv.com/ and of the need for lenders to begin letting tenants know what’s coming, Maghan said.

“If the owner’s not paying and they’re not responding, at a minimum the lender should send somebody ... I didn’t know until it was almost too late,” she said. “It was very stressful.”

Some tenants might even be interested in buying the property — saving it from going to foreclosure, Maghan said.

“Here, I was paying $1,000 a month for rent. They could have offered the house to me,” she said. As it was, a Realtor didn’t suggest that until two weeks later and, by then, “I was kind of burnt about it and said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’”

More troubled homeowners seeking help

With the current poor economy, more people having trouble paying their mortgage have turned to the Washington County Community Action Council (CAC) for help.

CAC helped 15 families with mortgage problems in fiscal year 2007, said Donna Rose, a housing counselor for the organization.

In fiscal year 2008, the number rose to 85.

For the first nine months of the current fiscal year, CAC has worked with 115 families with mortgage trouble, Rose said.

Rose said she didn’t know how much of an effect adjustable-rate mortgages are having on CAC clients.

In an adjustable-rate mortgage, the rate starts low, then jumps after a specified period. Those mortgages have been part of many recent foreclosures.

Rose said “a good many” of the people seeking help from CAC have been hurt by a loss of income, usually from losing a job.

She thought individual job losses, rather than any particular large round of local layoffs, were behind the families’ difficulties.

Rose said the families have had trouble refinancing their mortgages. CAC is helping them work with lenders on forbearance agreements, which give the mortgage holders more time to pay off their debts.

— Andrew Schotz