INLAND EMPIRE – Updating the latest home foreclosure statistics, Riverside County had the highest foreclosure rate in the state the first-half of the year.

Nearly 26,000 notices for mortgage default and auction sales plus bank repossessions were recorded in the county.

Senior economist John Husing offered an even more sobering figure.

“Forty-eight point nine percent of all the mortgages in the Inland Empire were on houses where falling prices put them underwater.”

California had the nation’s third-highest foreclosure rate the first-half of the year. (INT)

Story Date: August 1, 2011