According to the numbers, foreclosures across Illinois rose 17 percent during the first quarter of 2012 when compared to the fourth quarter of last year. Foreclosures in the state also jumped 14 percent when compared to the first quarter of 2011.

In fact, Illinois had the dubious distinction of having the third most foreclosures filings in the country during the first quarter, with its 37,600 properties with foreclosure filings trailing only California and Florida.

RealtyTrac’s March numbers for Illinois weren’t any better. According to the site, one in every 383 Illinois housing units received a foreclosure filing in March. Cook County alone during the month saw 6,950 foreclosure filings.

Foreclosures are bad for everyone. Families going through them suffer great financial loss and even greater emotional turmoil. Banks certainly aren’t thrilled to be stuck with so many homes that they usually have to sell below market value. And then there are other homeowners. When foreclosures dot their neighborhoods, they drag down the values of all nearby homes.

Just look at the average price of a foreclosure property in Illinois, according to RealtyTrac: $121,387. Considering that in March Illinois had 102,068 foreclosure homes, according to the site, that’s a lot of low-cost inventory for buyers to work through.

If you want to sell your home, this isn’t the best news. My advice? If you don’t absolutely have to sell, hold off. If you have no choice, talk with a REALTOR® who knows your neighborhood and can help you set the best possible price for your residence.

The Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court currently holds a pot of about $16 million in surplus funds created after foreclosed homes were re-sold. Those foreclosed homeowners who owed less on their mortgage loans than what these homes were sold for will receive the extra funds.

Of course, not everyone is owed a big payday. Dorothy Brown, clerk of the circuit court, told NBC 5 that one homeowner is owed just 13 cents. Of course, Brown also said that another homeowner is due $400,000.

The problem, though, is tracking down all of the former Chicago homeowners who are owed money. Many of these owners don’t realize that they are owed the money. Many who have suffered through the foreclosure process don’t leave forwarding addresses.

There is a way for Chicago residents who’ve gone through foreclosure to quickly determine if they are owed funds. They simply have to log onto the Cook County Clerk of the Circuit Court Website and enter their last names, first initials and phone numbers.

Brown told NBC 5 that she wanted to set up the Web site to make life at least a bit easier for those who have lost their residences to foreclosure. After all, these families have already been through an extraordinary amount of stress. Maybe the money they are owed can help at least a bit. Many homeowners who have lost their residences to foreclosure are also saddled with large amounts of credit-card debt and other unpaid bills. Every little bit of extra money, especially in today’s challenging economy, can help.

According to a report by RealtyTrac, the online foreclosure service, Illinois saw 14,349 foreclosure filings in January of this year, an increase of 14 percent when compared to December of 2011. This means that one in every 369 housing units in the state was in some point of the foreclosure process during the month, according to a feature story by the Associated Press.

It’s important to note that foreclosures as defined by RealtyTrac don’t mean that homeowners have already lost their residences. It just means that homes are at some point in the foreclosure process, a process that could include default notices being sent by banks, auction-sale notices being sent on properties and bank repossessions.

The January foreclosure rate in Illinois was also up 9 percent when compared to the same month one year earlier.

Illinois residents shouldn’t expect foreclosure numbers to fall any time soon, either. According to the Associated Press story, the number of housing foreclosures across the country is expected to rise now that attorneys general in 49 states have reached an historic settlement with five of the country’s biggest mortgage lenders. This settlement lays out foreclosure guidelines that could give banks the confidence to pursue foreclosures more aggressively.

About the only good news for Illinois homeowners was the fact that six other states had higher foreclosure rates in the month. Nevada in January continued to have the highest foreclosure rate in the country. Coming next were Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Michigan.

Illinois came next, to rank seventh in the country in the number of foreclosure notices filed in January.

According to a recent feature story in the Chicago Tribune, the number of homes in the foreclosure process rose 20 percent in November in Cook County when compared to one month earlier. The Tribune said that much of this increase stemmed from a jump of 57 percent in the number of homes in the county that were sent to court-ordered auctions.

Citing data from online foreclosure company RealtyTrac, the Tribune reported that foreclosure filings were reported on more than 224,000 properties across the United States in November. That’s a drop of 3 percent from October.

No matter how you look at the numbers there are too many housing foreclosures in Chicago and the United States. This is unfortunate because foreclosure has such a devastating effect on families.

If you’re struggling to pay your mortgage bills each month, call your mortgage lender immediately. The sooner you call your lender, the better your chances of working out a new payment arrangement, a reduction in your mortgage loan’s interest rate or some other way to avoid losing your home through foreclosure.

I understand that this is no easy thing, calling your mortgage lender and explaining that you’re struggling to pay your monthly housing bills. But lenders will often work with you to find some solution to your mortgage woes.

Foreclosures remain the number-one deterrent to a housing market rebound, both in Chicago and across the nation. Foreclosures make it more difficult for sellers to get the prices they want for their homes. Buyers would rather pay $50,000 less for a similar home down the street that’s gone through the foreclosure process.

If you don’t want to become the latest foreclosure statistic, call your lender. Ignoring your mortgage problems won’t help them go away.

Think of it this way: Buyers are more than happy to spend $50,000 less on a foreclosed home or a short sale that sits three doors down from sellers trying to sell their similar residence the traditional way. Simply put, distressed homes sell for less, driving down the value of surrounding residences.

The Chicago Sun-Times, though, recently ran a feature story on an interesting new trend regarding foreclosure properties: According to the story, more of them are becoming rentals.

According to the Sun-Times story, more than one in 10 Chicago houses is now vacant. To help fill these empty spaces, the city and several nonprofit agencies are renting out a growing number of these properties. These groups are also offering buyers financial incentives to purchase these properties.

The Sun-Times story cites the efforts of the Neighborhood Stabilization Program run by the city and Mercy Portfolio Services. The program has received $169 million from the federal government in Recovery Act dollars, and so far has used some of these funds to pay for 51 demolitions and the purchase of 161 residential properties. The purchases are the interesting part of the equation: The residential properties total 819 housing units in 22 different Chicago neighborhoods. The Sun-Times reports that 75 percent of these housing units are for rent.

Foreclosures will continue to glut the Chicago housing market for years to come. There are just too many distressed properties on the market today. It’s good to see, though, the city and nonprofit agencies working together on creative ways in which to deal with them.

No one program will completely ease the burden that foreclosures and short sales place on the Chicago housing market. But the more programs that do attack this problem, the better.

This month, though, RealtyTrac actually brought some good news for Chicago: The number of housing foreclosures in Illinois fell in May, according to the company.

Residential foreclosures dropped more than 20 percent in May when compared with April, according to RealtyTrac. This means that slightly more than 15,000 state housing units, or one in every 350, received a foreclosure notice in the month.

A foreclosure notice, by the way, doesn’t have to be an actual foreclosure. It could be a bank notice, scheduled auction or bank repossession.

Granted, this is still far too many foreclosures. But Illinois saw a bigger drop in foreclosures than did the country as a whole. RealtyTrac.com reported that the United States in general saw a 3 percent drop in housing foreclosures in May.

Overall, though, Illinois housing foreclosures were still up 38 percent from where they stood in May of 2009. And across the country, one in every 400 homes – nearly 323,000 households – received foreclosure notices in May. That’s up 0.5 percent from the same month one year earlier.

I’m happy to see the foreclosure numbers go down. Few things hurt the overall economy of an area, whether it’s Chicago or the entire country, like housing foreclosures. Think about it: When a family loses its house that family is obviously devastated, both emotionally and financially. A housing foreclosure stays on the credit reports of former homeowners for seven years, making it extremely difficult for these consumers to borrow money at reasonable rates during this time.

But housing foreclosures also burden banks and lenders. These financial institutions don’t want to take back these homes. That’s not how they make their money. They don’t want to have to sell these homes at lower prices.

Finally, foreclosures hurt neighborhoods, too. It’s difficult for sellers to attract good offers for their residences when there’s a foreclosure two doors down going for $50,000 less.

So let’s hope that RealtyTrac’s latest bit of good news isn’t a blip. Let’s hope it’s a trend, one that will help the housing market and the economy recover at a faster pace.

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But don’t let your fears of foreclosure override your common sense: If an outside company calls you and promises that it can rescue you from foreclosure, hang up the phone. The odds are good it’s either a scammer or a company that will charge you a significant amount of money for something that you can do on your own for free.

The Web site of the Illinois Association of REALTORS® recently posted a story from the Better Business Bureau branch that serves Chicago and Northern Illinois warning homeowners of a growing number of foreclosure-related scam artists. Foreclosure information is accessible to the public. This has led to big business among companies claiming to offer foreclosure-prevention services.

The scam works like this: An individual or company contacts homeowners whose homes are facing foreclosure. They’ll promise to either negotiate a mortgage loan modification or stop the foreclosure. Of course, they’ll require a hefty fee for their service.

Some of these callers will take the money from desperate homeowners and then do absolutely nothing. Even those companies that do perform foreclosure-prevention services don’t actually do anything that homeowners can’t do on their own for free.

If you’re facing foreclosure, or even if you’re worried that you might fall behind on your mortgage payments, you should always call your mortgage lender directly. Don’t work with an outside company. Call your lender, explain your financial situation and ask for help.

Remember, mortgage lenders and banks don’t want your home to fall into foreclosure. They don’t want to try to sell your residence. That’s not their business. The odds are good that your lender will try to work something out to prevent you from losing your home.

If you work with an outside foreclosure-prevention company? You’ll just be throwing more money away.

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But you might be surprised to learn that the foreclosure crisis has actually impacted renters in Chicago more than it has city homeowners. The Chicago Sun-Times recently wrote a story about this surprising situation, quoting a report from the Lawyers’ Committee for Better Housing that more than 125 multi-family buildings in Chicago fell into foreclosure each week in 2009.

The Lawyers’ Committee report said that 20,691 rental units were impacted by foreclosure in 2009. For the year, Chicago saw 6,560 multi-family building foreclosures. That’s more than the 4,000 single-family homes and condominiums that fell into foreclosure during the same year.

Foreclosure can be a nightmare for renters, too. We’ve all read news stories highlighting landlords who fail to tell their renters that they’ve fallen behind in their mortgage payments. When the building falls into foreclosure, these renters suddenly have no place to live. Imagine that shock: One morning you wake up with a roof over your head. The next, your home is yanked away through no fault of your own.

And that is just part of the problem that renters often face when their landlords lose their buildings to foreclosure. The Sun-Times story says that some landlords begin to neglect their buildings once they fear that they are in danger of foreclosure. The tenants of these buildings, of course, are the ones who suffer when landlords avoid fixing the lights in common areas, keeping the lawns trimmed or fixing broken windows. Many lenders won’t take responsibility for the upkeep of these buildings, either.

The Sun-Times story is an interesting one. We’ve all become accustomed to thinking of foreclosures as a problem for homeowners. But the story shows that in Chicago, as in the rest of the nation, foreclosure really is everyone’s problem. And until the housing foreclosure rate in the country drops, you can’t expect housing prices to fully rebound from the residential slump.

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According to a recent report by the Woodstock Institute, more homeowners in the Chicago area lost their residences to foreclosure in the first three months of this year than they had in any quarter during the last five years.

The Chicago Tribune covered this news late last week. And, yes, reading the story was a depressing experience.

That’s because foreclosures don’t help anyone. A family is out of their home. A bank or lender is stuck with a property it’d rather not have to sell. And neighborhood housing values take a hit. These are the three big effects of housing foreclosures.

According to the Tribune story, 9,302 homes went through a court-ordered auction in the six-county Chicago region during the first quarter of this year. This is significant because auctions are the last step in the foreclosure process. Of the homes that reached this step, lenders took back 95 percent.

In the city of Chicago itself, nearly 3,500 homes went to auction. Lenders again took back 95 percent of these residences.

The foreclosure numbers are depressing, but they shouldn’t be surprising. The recession hit Chicago, as it did most cities in the country, hard. Unemployment here stood at a far-too-high 11.5 percent in March, above the national average. When people are out of work, or when they see their annual incomes slashed, they struggle to pay their mortgage bills. Eventually they default on their loans, entering the foreclosure process.

There is hope for homeowners, though. If you are struggling to pay your mortgage each month immediately call your lender or bank. Tell a mortgage specialist there that you are struggling to make your payments and that you fear you’ll soon start falling behind. Remember, your bank doesn’t want you to lose your house to foreclosure. It should be motivated to do something – such as lowering your loan’s interest rate or lengthening its terms – to make your mortgage payment more affordable.

The worst thing you can do, and the one thing that will certainly add you to the soaring number of Chicago homeowners facing foreclosure, is to do nothing. You can’t hide from foreclosure; you need to call your lender.

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A local real estate company reported that distressed properties accounted for at least 34 percent of home sales reported in the Chicago area in 2009.

This continues a trend that started in late 2007. And it’s not one unique to Chicago. As the nation’s economy began to falter, a growing number of homeowners lost their jobs or saw their annual incomes plummet. Many of these homeowners suddenly began struggling to make their mortgage payments for the first time in their lives.

In 2009, U.S. households received 2.8 million foreclosure filings, according to online real estate data company RealtyTrac. This figure represents an all-time high for the country.

It’s little surprise, then, that so many of the Chicago area’s housing sales last year were of foreclosed and distressed properties. Fortunately, there is help for homeowners who are struggling to pay their mortgage bills. The federal government in 2009 launched its Home Affordable Modification Program, which provides financial incentives to encourage mortgage lenders and banks to somehow lower the monthly mortgage payments of struggling homeowners.

If you are having difficulty making your mortgage payments, call your mortgage lender immediately. Even if your lender isn’t participating in the federal program, it might still be willing to modify your mortgage loan. After all, your lender does not benefit from seeing you lose your home to foreclosure.

I’m glad that home sales seem to be rising steadily these days. But I’ll be even happier when a much smaller percentage of these sales comes from distressed properties.

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