Gonna Get a Whole Lot Worse...

...before it gets any better. Building off of yesterday's dose of harsh economic reality, more statistics over which to cry into your (cheap, domestic, on sale) beer.

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we haven't even begun to see the really harsh effects of the housing/credit crisis. RealtyTrac, a company which deals in default and other real estate related data, reports that June US foreclosure filings had jumped 53% from the same period last year, and bank seizures of properties have more than tripled:

One in every 501 U.S. households either lost the home to foreclosure, received a default notice or was warned of a pending auction, RealtyTrac, an Irvine, California-based seller of default data, said today in a statement. Bank seizures rose 171 percent.

"The foreclosure problem is getting worse and will stay with us well into the next decade,'' Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody's Economy.com in West Chester, Pennsylvania, said in an interview. "The job market is eroding and homeowners have less equity. Lenders are much less willing to work with you if you've got negative equity, and you're more likely to give up your house if you're deeply underwater.''

Foreclosure activity is the highest since the Great Depression of the 1930s, said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac's vice president of marketing. Home prices, which fell the most on record in April, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index of 20 U.S. metropolitan areas, have created a cycle where shrinking equity drives homeowners into foreclosure, which in turn further pushes down home prices, Sharga said.....

"We'll have 1 million bank-owned properties by the end of the year,'' Sharga said in an interview. "That will represent between one-fourth and one-third of all home sales.''