By Dawn Cobb 

Residential foreclosures posted for February’s auctions toppled records across North Texas, with Denton County surpassing 500 for the first time, according to foreclosure statistics released Thursday.

Denton County residential foreclosure postings first topped the 400 mark in November, reflecting the expected increase in foreclosed homes, officials said.

“If we’re seeing foreclosures up today, that’s probably reflecting a process that began years ago,” said Dr. Bernard Wein­stein, director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of North Texas.

“It’s reflecting a lot of poorly collateralized lending in ’04, ’05 and ‘06 — particularly to low- and moderate-income households and single-adult households,” he said.

“We’re now seeing the result of that — not because the economy is heading south,” Weinstein said. “North Texas is one of the strongest metropolitan areas economically in the country.”

With 566 homes set for auction next month, Denton County was not alone in the record-breaking foreclosure numbers, according to a release from Foreclosure Listing Service Inc.

Denton County records showed a 50 percent increase from last February, which had 377 residential foreclosure postings. The February numbers were 44 percent higher than January.

Dallas County listed 2,351 postings for the February residential foreclosure auctions; Collin County, 623; and Tarrant County, 1,775.

Dallas County postings were up 22 percent from last February at 1,932 and 41 percent higher than in January.

Tarrant County records showed a 39 percent increase from last February’s 1,274 postings and a 47 percent jump from January 2008 figures.

Collin County postings were up 32 percent from last February at 472 postings and showed a 54 percent hike from residential postings for January 2008. The 623 postings for February is the first time Collin County has topped the 500 mark, hovering in the 300 to 400 range consecutively for two years, according to the report.

One reason cited for the substantial increase in February postings is due to the January auction sale falling on New Year’s Day, according to George Roddy Sr., president of Foreclosure Listing Service. By law, lenders in Texas are only allowed to take properties through foreclosure on the first Tuesday of each month.

“This was kind of a shocker even though we knew there was an impact due to a lack of filings for the Jan. 1 auction,” he said. “This actually caught us by surprise.”

Roddy figured about 15 percent of the increased postings in February were likely tied to the delayed postings.

“The fact that we saw the astronomical increases all over the metroplex is an indicator that it is not just that factor,” he said, adding that the March residential foreclosure listings will tell a clearer picture about what is happening in North Texas.

Projecting whether the record-breaking February numbers will continue in March is difficult, Roddy said, adding that even the 1980s numbers during the oil bust didn’t touch the current records.

“If we see the same indicators, with a higher than the last 12-month average, then we’ve got something to really talk about,” he said.

Almost 43,000 Dallas-Fort Worth area homes were posted for foreclosure in 2007 — an increase of 10 percent for the year, according to records.

In Denton County, posted residential foreclosures totaled 3,357 for 2007 — up from 3,187 in 2006; 2,576 in 2005; 2,368 in 2004; and 2,098 in 2003.

Roddy has predicted the increase in foreclosures in Denton County and the Dallas-Fort Worth area would continue for the foreseeable future — the next 15 to 18 months.

Another reason for increasing residential foreclosures has been tied to the higher costs of living — including gasoline and utility prices, credit card payments and higher taxes — which all make it harder for families to manage expenses.

One upswing to the foreclosure situation has been the higher numbers for rental properties, said Scott Brown, president and owner of Scott Brown Properties and other subsidiaries.

“What happens is that when people start losing their homes, they have to start renting,” he said, adding that the past summer had been the best in five years.

Home foreclosures in the Dallas-Fort Worth area have grown by one of the biggest amounts in the country in recent years due in large part to lax lending standards, analysts say.

Weinstein cited data indicating that in 2006, the Dallas-Fort Worth market had an estimated $7.5 billion in subprime lending.

“That’s an indication of how vulnerable we are,” he said.

The amount totaled an estimated 23 percent to 24 percent of all of the loan volume that year, he said.

In 2006, the Dallas region was ranked 27th in the country in terms of subprime lending; Fort Worth and surrounding towns ranked 57th — both among more than 400 metropolitan areas in the U.S., Weinstein said.

“It could get real nasty,” he said. “Let’s just hope we muddle through, as we have in the past.”

The mortgage industry modified an estimated 54,000 loans and established formal repayment plans with another 183,000 borrowers during the third quarter of 2007, according to a study issued Thursday by the Mortgage Bankers Association.

The report is based on responses from mortgage servicers covering about 33 million mortgage loans, about 62 percent of all mortgage loans outstanding. The report did not have any regional breakdowns.

While the help was good news for some, the pain still continued for others as third quarter foreclosure actions were started on approximately 384,000 additional loans.

The study determined that 63 percent of the new foreclosures were cases where the borrowers did not live in the property and did not respond to repeated attempts at contact, or where the borrowers failed to carry out an existing repayment or loan modification plan.

“The mortgage industry took major steps during the third quarter to help those borrowers who could be helped,” said Jay Brinkmann, MBA’s vice president of research.

He said the number of families helped compared favorably with the number of foreclosure actions started, particularly when the foreclosures were adjusted to remove the borrowers who clearly could not be helped.

Brinkmann said the U.S. Treasury Department had played a crucial role in bringing the lending community together to develop approaches dealing with the current problems.