Los Angeles : Every morning at 6am, Brenda Duchemin kneels down on two plush throw pillows in front of a carved teak shrine in her Diamond Bar home and chants.
In front of a cluster of oranges, a small teacup and a golden lotus flower on the shrine, the slight 53 year old tries to expel the negative images: the two homes she and her husband, Mohammad Ashraf, lost to foreclosure auctions last month, the bankruptcy petition they were forced to file in 2009, and their ongoing battle to stay in their spacious and airy home.
Daily chanting helps her karma, Duchemin says, which is currently not in such a good state.
"We don't know what we did in a past life to bring this out. I must have been a horrendous person down the line," she said, a slight Boston accent tinting her speech.
Precarious position
Though signs of recovery in the housing market are emerging, thousands of people throughout Southern California are still in a precarious position on the brink of foreclosure, struggling with monthly bills and mortgage payments.
Duchemin and Ashraf are an extreme example because they've gone through foreclosures on two homes and are in danger of losing a third.
They aren't alone: Flimsy lending practices mean that thousands of other borrowers face the prospect of repeated foreclosures, experts said.
The problem is especially visible in areas that attracted speculative buyers during the boom.
In Maricopa County in Arizona, which includes Phoenix, at least 283 individuals have received a foreclosure notice on two or more properties since 2006, according to data provided by RealtyTrac.
Multiple foreclosures are "probably more common in this decade than they've ever been because everyone was running to get into the real estate investing business," said Rick Sharga, a senior vice-president at RealtyTrac.
Clark County in Nevada, another area that attracted house flippers, had at least 179 buyers who were foreclosed on more than once over the same period, the data show.
A RealtyTrac spokesman said the actual numbers were probably larger than the estimates provided, because some of the data were private.
"It wasn't unusual to allow folks to buy not only two homes but three, four or five," said Sean O'Toole, founder of data-tracking firm ForeclosureRadar. Because people thought the price of real estate would keep climbing, O'Toole said, they figured that the more homes they bought, the more they'd earn eventually.
"In a lot of cases, you had folks in this gold rush mentality: ‘Real estate is going up, the more houses I buy, the more money I'll make'," he said.
