ForeclosureS.com: 3 Out of 1000 Owners Have Lost Their Homes This Year.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- The foreclosure pox continues to spread unchecked across the country despite efforts by government and industry to stop it.

3 out of every 1,000 homeowners in the United States lost their homes to foreclosure in the first half of the year. That's up 41 percent compared

These per capita numbers translate to almost a quarter-million residential properties (247,907) that ended up in the hands of banks or lenders this year because homeowners couldn't get their mortgage default problems solved, according to ForeclosureS.com, which tracks and analyzes foreclosure filing through its database of more than 3.2 million listings nationwide. Per capita reflects the number of filings as a percent of the number of households in an area.

"Hundreds of thousands of more homeowners won't be able to escape foreclosure for most of the rest of the year either unless stagnating housing prices and markets pick up, and the nation's economy rebounds, too," says Alexis McGee, president of ForeclosureS.com and author of the upcoming book, "The ForeclosureS.com Guide to Investing: Making Huge Profits Investing in Pre-Foreclosures Without Selling Your Soul" (John Wiley, September 2007).

"All the congressional, industry, and media talk about helping financially strapped homeowners work out their default woes has had little effect on the current foreclosure picture. Instead, foreclosure numbers keep rising; the effects of the sub-prime lender debacle have spilled over into other mortgage markets like Alt-A (those borrowers that aren't prime, but have better than sub-prime credit histories); and some analysts even predict the increased tightening of lending practices may actually have a detrimental affect on homeownership overall.

Just like a pendulum, lending standards swung too far out "getting everyone into a mortgage, whether they could afford it or not" to "tightened lending standards that are preventing qualified buyers from homeownership. At some point, the pendulum will need to rest in the middle, with lending standards easing from where they are now -- and the sooner the better," adds McGee.

The first six months pre-foreclosure filing numbers are also grim. These are the homeowners who have defaulted on their mortgages but haven't yet lost their homes to foreclosure. Nationally, nearly 7 out of every 1,000 households (more than 507,000) were forced to deal with the threat of foreclosures year to date.