BonnerSprings.com

Bonner Springs — To figure out roughly the number of people caught up in the recent housing market troubles in Bonner Springs, Barbara Bille is the woman to talk to.

Bille, the Bonner Springs codes inspector, says she usually drives through the whole town, looking for code infractions, once a month.

"If a property's normally maintained and then it's stopped, something happened," she said.

"It's just noticeable to me," Bille said. "I start seeing sites once maintained not maintained, then I start digging through, to find the water shut off and the people gone. Then I call the bank because I couldn't get hold of anybody when no one responds to a letter."

Bille estimates she's seen"at least a dozen" homes that were probable foreclosures since last April.

Usually, as in 2006, Bille said, "we might have had a couple, not more than five."

Bille said she sometimes realizes the residents of a home have left even before the property is foreclosed.

"I figure it out because the house is vacant, and the letter comes back with no forwarding address," Bille said. "That's a big clue, because people usually leave a forwarding address."

She often knows little more than what the records show.

"I have no idea what the circumstances are," Bille said. "I know a couple were double mortgages, just because I looked up the deed."

Perhaps the worst case was when she saw an actual eviction.

"It's not nice to see, and it's hard on them," she said.

The foreclosure figures from a couple of sources seem to jibe with Bille's experience.

The Web site www.RealtyTrac.com lists 14 foreclosures in Bonner Springs. There were also listed one in Edwardsville, 97 total in Wyandotte County, and 1,541 in Kansas.

According to the Mortgage Bankers Association, as of Sept. 30, 2007, Kansas had 340,364 loans, with 8,271, or 2.4 percent of them seriously delinquent, or 90 or more days past due in the third quarter of the year.

Of those loans, 34,650 were subprime loans, and 3,205, or 9.3 percent, of them were seriously delinquent. That's a more than four-fold increase over the same period in 2006.

That compares with 6,990, or 2.2 percent of 316,286 loans in Kansas seriously delinquent in the third quarter of 2006, and 656, or 2 percent, of the 32,493 subprime loans seriously delinquent at that time.

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