Washington area hit hard by foreclosures in 2008

The Washington area saw more than 50,000 foreclosure filings in 2008 — about a 160 percent increase from 2007 — according to recent data from the online foreclosure-tracking Web site RealtyTrac.

When compared with 2006 data, some of the numbers for local jurisdictions are staggering. Manassas reported 37 properties with foreclosure filings in 2006 and 1,424 in 2008 — a spike of nearly 4,000 percent. And though Montgomery County saw 4,651 foreclosure filings last year, a modest number considering its size, the filings spiked more than 3,000 percent from the 141 filings in 2006.