By Melissa Dunson

mdunson@joplinglobe.com

For years, those in real-estate sales in Southwest Missouri have said this area has been insulated from much of the economic fluctuations regularly facing the coasts.

But when it comes to foreclosures, those same agents, along with local government offices and nonprofit agencies, say the Joplin area is seeing the same jump in homes going back to lenders that is taking the rest of the country by storm.

So far this year in Jasper County, 327 families have lost their homes to foreclosure. That compares with 429 foreclosures for all of 2006 and 343 in 2005.

The McDonald County recorder’s office also is reporting a large jump in the number of pre-foreclosures this year. The first step in a foreclosure is the appointment of successor trustees, and as of Tuesday, McDonald County had appointed 76 successor

trustees. That is significantly more than the total of 50 for all of last year. In 2005, 70 cases were reported.

According to the recorder’s office, Barton County has had 19 foreclosures so far this year. Last year, the county had 13. Barton County had 20 in 2005 and 17 in 2004.

Newton County, Mo., and Cherokee County, Kan., did not have local foreclosure information readily available.

Cheryl Ray-Jones, a certified credit counselor with Consumer Credit Counseling Service in Joplin, said her office is seeing such a jump in local home foreclosures that all the counselors in her office recently had to become certified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development just to deal with the demand. Ray-Jones said her office used to deal primarily with credit-card debt, but that half of its work now comes from bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings.

“I wish I had the answers,” she said, “because it is a problem that is affecting a lot of people right now.”

Janice Franklin, managing attorney with Legal Aid of Western Missouri in Joplin, said her office has seen an increase in foreclosure counseling in the past few months. Legal Aid has been doing the counseling since last year, and Franklin said the stories are becoming more frequent and more devastating.

“We’ve seen horror stories,” she said. “The ripple effects of foreclosure go through the whole family. We were seeing so many there for a while it was almost one every day.”

Local real-estate sales agents are also trying to deal with the effect of an increasing number of foreclosed homes. Ed August, a Charles Burt sales agent in Joplin, said his office has seen a growing number of foreclosures in recent months.