Foreclosures still up for April but stabilizing

During April, El Paso County recorded 539 foreclosure starts — Notices of Election and Demand — according to Public Trustee Tom Mowle.

“This is probably the highest monthly total ever recorded in this county, breaking last March’s record total of 488 by 10 percent,” he said in a statement issued today, adding that the department doesn’t have monthly statistics from before 1991.

So far this year, the number of foreclosures initiated is 1,831, about 10 percent higher than last year.

But not all the news is bad.

The Public Trustee’s office also released 4,525 Deeds of Trust, the highest number since October 2007, indicating that either property sales or refinancing (or both) are increasing.

“This is very good news — if it is sustained,” Mowle said. “From 2004 to 2007, this number of releases would have been only slightly above the monthly average. We may be beginning to pull out of the slump in real estate, but we have a ways to go yet before we could say that it is strong.”