Another year has brought another disturbing milestone for home foreclosures in St. Joseph County.

2008 marks the second consecutive year that foreclosures topped 2,000 properties.

It's the fourth year in a row that a record high was set.

The 2008 statistics show that the local foreclosure crisis is still getting worse, instead of better.

You could say that lots and lots of foreclosed properties were sold this year by the St. Joseph County Sheriff's Department. "I've even sold a couple of complete subdivisions this year," said Lt. Andy Pletcher of the St. Joseph County P.D. civil division. "There's several homes in the development, but they just, we just sold the lots."

36-lots in the Royal Oak Estates subdivision went on the auction block in October.

In all, 2008 was another record setting year with 2,155 foreclosed properties set for sale by the department. While that's only a slight increase over last year, it marks the second straight year that foreclosures topped 2,000. That's double the trouble the department handled back in 2002--the first year foreclosures topped 1,000.

While a total of 55-homes were scheduled to be sold at today's foreclosure auction, the majority were removed from the list before the bidding started.

"I think its encouraging," said Pletcher, "we had 55 on the sale today, 30-cancelled so we actually auctioned off 25." Pletcher said that at the beginning of the year only five or ten homes were routinely taken off the list.

There are numerous reasons why a foreclosed home would be removed from a scheduled auction.

For instance, a homeowner can stop proceedings by filing bankruptcy. That was the case for at least one of the homes removed from the list today.

It would also indicate a new willingness on the part of banks to work with delinquent customers. While some banks have recently pledged to do that, News Center 16 was unable to confirm that any of today's cancellations were related to such a willingness.