NEW YORK (BankingMyWay) — It’s not good news for the real estate market this week, especially on the foreclosure front.

New data shows that foreclosures are mounting just as foreclosure sales are dipping. That means there are more foreclosed homes on the market but fewer people interested in buying them.

According to research from RealtyTrac, there were 230,678 new foreclosure filings (default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions) in the U.S. in October – that’s up an eye-opening 7% increase from September of this year. And as far as foreclosure sales, RealtyTrac says that only 75,243 foreclosed properties were sold in September 2011, down about 25% from the month before, the company reports.

A deeper look into the numbers suggests some improvement, though, when you look at year-over-year data.

Foreclosures may have been up by more than 7% in October, but they were down 31% from October 2010, which suggests a larger recovery for the U.S. real estate market. Still, the October data could mean that recovery is slowing down, particularly as so many court cases wind their way through the judicial system.

“The October foreclosure numbers continue to show strong signs that foreclosure activity is coming out of the rain delay we’ve been in for the past year as lenders corrected foreclosure paperwork and processing problems,” James Saccacio, chief executive officer of RealtyTrac, said in a statement. “However, recent state court rulings and new state laws keep changing the rules of the foreclosure game on the fly, creating more uncertainty in the housing market and threatening to prolong the road to a robust real estate recovery.”

Some of the new foreclosure problems are regional. RealtyTrac reports that defaults in California, Florida and Michigan all hit one-year highs, although other high-foreclosure areas, like Las Vegas, saw the rate of foreclosures decline.

More disturbingly, the rate of default notices in states that weren’t at the top of anyone’s list of foreclosure “hot spots” are now seeing a flood of foreclosure notices. Pennsylvania  (50%) and Indiana (61%), for example, both saw a rise on default notices at an alarmingly high rate on a month-to-month basis.

Home foreclosure auctions were up in October, and significantly so. Florida (57%), Minnesota (43%) and Illinois (38%) all saw big hikes in scheduled auctions. Even so, RealtyTrac reports, those numbers are all down from 2010.

Economists and real estate industry analysts will need to see a few more months of data before anyone declares a new foreclosure crisis in America.

But if October’s numbers are any indication, the real estate market is once again trending in the wrong direction.

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