CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- On Tuesday, June 10, Heath Greathouse stood alone, in gym shoes and shorts, at the top of the Kanawha Courthouse steps, reading aloud from a paper in his hand.

"Notice is hereby given that default has occurred in the payment of the certain indebtments. ..." he said loudly.

People passed by, walking in and out of the courthouse. Most barely glanced at him.

He was foreclosing on a 67-year-old Dunbar health-care worker, reading her Notice of Sale. Nobody else came to the sale, no owner, no bidders.

By state law dating back into the 1800s, the trustee must read the Notice of Sale aloud in front of the courthouse in the county where the property is located, on the day of the sale. Then the county clerk staff registers the sale in the Record of Trustee Sales book.

"Sold to the bank," Greathouse concluded.

"Mostly, nobody comes to these sales," he said. "Mostly, the bank gets it back."

Greathouse works for Liberty Title Services in Parkersburg. He was reading for Riverside Trustees in Martinsburg. They were foreclosing for Ace Mortgage Funding Co., headquartered in Indianapolis.

Six miles away in Dunbar, the woman who just lost her house was sleeping. She had just worked a night shift. "Wasn't any point in me coming," she said later. "I've been working overtime to make these payments. I'm doing the best I can, but I've had to take care of my mama too, and that's just how it is."

She asked not to be identified by name. "This is hard enough." But she invited the Sunday Gazette-Mail to photograph her front door.

The lace doily on the door said, "Bless our home as we come and go." Her foreclosure sale was the 181st in Kanawha County for 2008.

Last year, in 2007, the Kanawha County clerk's staff recorded 357 foreclosures, compared with 220 in 2000.

Nobody knows how many

How many West Virginia homes and businesses were sold in front of courthouses in 2007? "Nobody in state government can tell you," said Sam Drucker, Kanawha County record room supervisor.

"We record these foreclosures, year after year, but nobody asks how many there were," he said. "With foreclosures all over the news, you'd think they'd want to know."

The Division of Banking does not ask, in part because they cannot, by federal law, oversee the out-of-state banks who foreclose most, said Bob Lamont, Division of Banking attorney.

The federal government does not ask either.

In early summer 2008, the Gazette-Mail and county clerk staff in all 55 courthouses counted the records of trustee sales (foreclosures) for 2007.

They found that 2,550 homes and businesses were sold on West Virginia's courthouse steps in 2007.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- On Tuesday, June 10, Heath Greathouse stood alone, in gym shoes and shorts, at the top of the Kanawha Courthouse steps, reading aloud from a paper in his hand.

"Notice is hereby given that default has occurred in the payment of the certain indebtments. ..." he said loudly.

People passed by, walking in and out of the courthouse. Most barely glanced at him.

He was foreclosing on a 67-year-old Dunbar health-care worker, reading her Notice of Sale. Nobody else came to the sale, no owner, no bidders.

By state law dating back into the 1800s, the trustee must read the Notice of Sale aloud in front of the courthouse in the county where the property is located, on the day of the sale. Then the county clerk staff registers the sale in the Record of Trustee Sales book.

"Sold to the bank," Greathouse concluded.

"Mostly, nobody comes to these sales," he said. "Mostly, the bank gets it back."

Greathouse works for Liberty Title Services in Parkersburg. He was reading for Riverside Trustees in Martinsburg. They were foreclosing for Ace Mortgage Funding Co., headquartered in Indianapolis.

Six miles away in Dunbar, the woman who just lost her house was sleeping. She had just worked a night shift. "Wasn't any point in me coming," she said later. "I've been working overtime to make these payments. I'm doing the best I can, but I've had to take care of my mama too, and that's just how it is."

She asked not to be identified by name. "This is hard enough." But she invited the Sunday Gazette-Mail to photograph her front door.

The lace doily on the door said, "Bless our home as we come and go." Her foreclosure sale was the 181st in Kanawha County for 2008.

Last year, in 2007, the Kanawha County clerk's staff recorded 357 foreclosures, compared with 220 in 2000.

Nobody knows how many

How many West Virginia homes and businesses were sold in front of courthouses in 2007? "Nobody in state government can tell you," said Sam Drucker, Kanawha County record room supervisor.

"We record these foreclosures, year after year, but nobody asks how many there were," he said. "With foreclosures all over the news, you'd think they'd want to know."

The Division of Banking does not ask, in part because they cannot, by federal law, oversee the out-of-state banks who foreclose most, said Bob Lamont, Division of Banking attorney.

The federal government does not ask either.

In early summer 2008, the Gazette-Mail and county clerk staff in all 55 courthouses counted the records of trustee sales (foreclosures) for 2007.

They found that 2,550 homes and businesses were sold on West Virginia's courthouse steps in 2007.

That number does not include:

A count of 2,550 foreclosure sales in 2007 is:

Edward Prescott, vice president of Richmond's Federal Reserve Bank research, recently reviewed the state's mortgages statistics. "West Virginia's foreclosure situation, while it's not terrible, is not as good as everybody has been claiming it to be," he said. "It's in the middle."

Who are the people who are losing homes? County clerks described a range of situations:

Bren Pomponio works for Mountain State Justice, a Charleston public interest law firm, which represents people on fixed and low incomes. "Every week, we have intake day," he said, "and the day is packed with working families, retired people, low-income people, disabled people, coming in to try to save their homes. It's almost more than we can keep up with. And it has not subsided. If anything, it has increased in the past few years."

In the past four years, his law firm has prevented thousands of foreclosures through predatory mortgage lawsuits that resulted in injunctions and settlements with national lenders.

"We hear that some parts of the West Virginia housing market are doing fine," he said. "And we know that, in the panhandles, there was a lot of development. But the people we see are not part of that."

The state needs to gather its own numbers, says Joe Hatfield, longtime director of the West Virginia Housing Development Fund. "Somebody needs to do this," he said.

The Housing Development Fund has a much lower foreclosure rate than the state as a whole does. The statewide foreclosure sale rate is 1 in 55 mortgages. The Housing Development Fund foreclosure sale rate is only 1 in 150 in 2007, their records show.

If the state could count foreclosure notices, Hatfield said, trouble spots could be addressed early and policy decisions could be made on verifiable information.

"We'd love to have that data," said Tracy Hudson of the state Division of Banking, "but we don't have the personnel to collect it. They [the legislators] would have to give us at least two more people."

A few states have developed their own counts, said David Prescott of the National Governors Association. Colorado has a county-level Office of Public Trustee that processes all foreclosures and reports to the state quarterly.

You need data over time, Hatfield said. You need to know how many are second mortgages, how many are prime and subprime, and so forth.

"We need to watch this," he said, because the subprime crisis is not the end of the problem. "We've moved into a different kind of storm now." The price of food, gas, utilities and other necessities is going up, and "some people who used to have enough disposable income to keep their mortgage current are having trouble."

"We are not bad for now," he said. "But if unemployment goes up, we could have a serious problem."

Reach Kate Long at katel...@wvgazette.com or 348-1798.

Findings on foreclosures

The Gazette-Mail organized a count of 2007 foreclosure sales recorded in West Virginia's 55 courthouses and interviewed people who create the statistics. Some findings:

RealtyTrac undercounts in West Virginia, and RealtyTrac's third-lowest foreclosure ranking for West Virginia is not accurate.