I talked with a few people recently who spend their days working with foreclosures from different sides of the issue, plus I have some numbers showing foreclosure filings in different areas around Pierce County.

Pam VanderLinda, an agent with Parkside Realty who specializes in foreclosure sales, said business took off in the second quarter this year. Banks hire VanderLinda to list foreclosed properties.

“It’s been crazy busy,” said VanderLinda, who’s getting about 10 new homes a week to put up for sale. This time last year she said about three to four a month came in.

Most of the foreclosures she's seeing are for homes financed in 2005 and 2006, she said.

“I just think the prices were too high, everything was selling and everyone was jumping in on it and all of a sudden it crashes. I do a lot of work for Fannie Mae, and they are taking huge hits on a lot of the houses,” she said.

VanderLinda, who said she’s working 12 hours a day six days a week, expects to stay busy for awhile.

“I don’t think it’s going to get any better until about 2011,” she said.

Windermere agent Erik Tinglum works at Foreclosure Solutions, which helps investors find foreclosure properties. He specializes in Pierce County.

He said the increase in foreclosures locally and nationally falls across every price range.

“It’s pretty clear the increase is due to some poor decisions on the part of borrowers, some of them were doing nothing more than accessing their equity,” he said. “Now we see there’s been a devaluation and so people aren’t able to refinance.”

That said, foreclosures here aren’t nearly as bad as they are in some other places, he said. For the second quarter of the year, Tacoma had one foreclosure filing for every 179 households compared to one for every 171 households in the U.S., according to RealtyTrac. But look at somewhere like Miami and you'll see one foreclosure filing for every 62 households.

Today’s foreclosures come from a mentality shift that occurred two to three years ago, he said.

“That mentality was pandemic. All the way across the board. People started looking at homes as a checkbook. They didn’t look at it as a place to raise a family, it became an opportunity to make money. And certainly a home is the largest investment a family will ever have. But to consider it a checkbook was very short sighted,” he said.

People interested in buying foreclosure properties need to watch out for numerous red flags, he said: location, liens, multiple failing mortgages.

“You’ve got to have some serious ice in your veins to do this and be successful at it,” he said.

When I asked Tinglum if he had any reservations about making money off other people’s misfortunes, he said, “I wrestled with that, thought of that from a moral standpoint. The reality is that home is going to be foreclosed on and I cannot prevent that from happening. There’s increasing opportunity with banks trying to put together forbearance agreements of all kinds. The reality is those that come into foreclosure need to be put back into the marketplace.”

Teresa Seeley, the housing coordinator at Consumer Counseling Northwest in University Place, works with homeowners in danger of defaulting on their mortgage. Most she sees are loans with rates that adjust; some adjust so many times that the borrower can handle one upward adjustment but not the subsequent ones.

Often, she calls the lender to bargain for more favorable loan terms.

“The other day I spent an hour on the phone with Countrywide and they would have rewritten the loan except for a $2,700 collection. She should have never been put into the home in the first place,” Seeley said.

That loan’s interest rate, now at 9.45 percent, shot up after two years and is now scheduled to reset every six months, Seeley said.

Some loans do get redone. But when banks won’t work with a borrower, Seeley said filing for bankruptcy protection is an option. The best thing homeowners facing mortgage troubles can do is talk to someone before they miss a mortgage payment.

“If I can get them when they first think they’re late, that would be wonderful. But usually we get them two or three months late,” she said.

If you’re facing mortgage problems, you can reach Consumer Counseling Northwest at (253) 588-1858. Or try the state homeownership hotline at 877-894-4663.

Here are second quarter foreclosure numbers, according to RealtyTrac, which compiles foreclosure filings, including auction notices and defaults. Typically, I would include the percentage change from the previous year, but RealtyTrac only provided the change from the previous quarter.