Foreclosures - 'We Don’t See Any Signs of a Peak at this Point'

From Sunpost.net:

Foreclosures have picked up speed in San Joaquin County, where the number of homes to hit the auction block has reached more than 12 times last year’s levels. Through March 2007, 539 homes were sold in the county’s courthouse auctions. Compare that with just 44 in the same period in 2006, according to Foreclosure Radar, a tracking service based in Discovery Bay. And with the biggest rise of the past two years coming in March — when auctioned homes jumped from 172 to 234 per month — a trend expected to continue.

"We don’t see any signs of a peak at this point," said Sean O’Toole, head of Foreclosure Radar, a real estate consultant who has followed the foreclosure market the past five years.
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[W]hen prices stopped climbing last year, many buyers found themselves stuck with loans they could never afford in the long term. It’s a situation some lenders had ignored the past several years because the housing market was able to satisfy everyone, [local mortgage broker Deborah] Romero said. "A lot of common sense went out the window when real estate became so valuable," she said.
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Judy Thompson, a housing counselor in Stockton, said that lack of common sense has meant that a lot more people show up at her office in a disastrous financial state.
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Some of her clients face mortgage payments nearly equal to their income, while at the same time, their houses have gone down in value. At that point, there’s very little that can stop the property from going to auction, Thompson said.