The Northern Virginia housing market continued to stabilize in August, while foreclosures in the Maryland suburbs spiked from a year ago.

A total of 873 properties in Prince William County received a foreclosure notice in August, according to the online foreclosure-tracking Web site RealtyTrac. The county posted a 36 percent drop in foreclosures from August 2008 and a 16 percent drop from July. In Fairfax, the commonwealth’s most populous county, more than 1,200 foreclosures were filed last month, but those numbers marked a 5 percent drop from last year and a 34 percent drop from July.