During the housing market crisis we have read many and often contradictory accounts of just how many homes are in foreclosure, or the number of homes being foreclosed upon, or the number of home mortgages in a delinquent state. The process of foreclosing on a delinquent mortgage is a lengthy one and the measures being spoken of in the media so often refer to measurements at different stages in this process. What we present here are the number of homes that were repossessed by the bank, the number of home foreclosures that reach the endgame in three different years.

Geographic reference: United States
Year: 2008, 2009 and 2010 (estimate)
Market size: 862,000, 918,000 and 980,000 housing units respectively
Source: “Record U.S. Foreclosures in 2009,” an article on the World Socialist Web Site, available online here. The 2010 figure was taken from “Number of Homes Taken by Lenders Tumbles,” SFGate.com a news site sponsored by Hearst Communications Inc. and available online here.
NOTE: A new RealtyTrac Press Release came out on January 13, 2011 and has been reported on by the AP here. The AP report states that over one million homes were repossessed in 2010. This heavily repeated figure is all over the news, blogospher, and Internet yet, oddly, we have been unable to obtain an actual figure of repossessed homes from a thorough search of the RealtyTrac web site. So, we shall leave our originally presented estimate as is.
Original source: RealtyTrac Inc.