Foreclosure news April 2012 from CoreLogic reveals another rough month for home owners and the housing market. Since the housing bubble burst in 2008, over 3.5 million Americans have lost their homes. The $26 billion mortgage settlement implementation may make a bad situation worse.

CoreLogic, a major provider of housing market data, released a monthly report this week that impacts the present and future of a number of homeowners, and the foreclosure news April 2012 makes for a compelling story.

A total of 66,000 foreclosures were completed nationally last month. The silver lining is that this figure represents a significant drop from April 2011 when 78,000 homes were repossessed. However, the number runs dead even with March of this year when another 66,000 Americans lost their homes. While the rate of completed foreclosures appears to be slowing, the CoreLogic report bears a heartbreaking statistic: since the housing bubble officially burst in September 2008, roughly 3.6 million homes across the country have been reclaimed from those unable to keep up with the terms of their mortgage loan.

CoreLogic’s National Foreclosure Report for April 2012 revealed other notable trends. Of the 66,000 foreclosures tracked last month, five states account for nearly 50 percent of the total. California, Michigan, Texas, Georgia and Arizona are the unlucky states most affected by foreclosure proceedings in April. All of these areas have taken a beating since the crisis began.

When drilled down to the level of individual municipalities, my hometown of Chicago ranks number one on the list of cities with the highest foreclosure inventory. At 6.3 percent, the Windy City’s catalog is actually half a percentage point higher than it was just a year ago.

Mark Fleming, chief economist for CoreLogic highlighted another important data point. He said “There were more than 830,000 completed foreclosures over the past year or, in other words, one completed foreclosure for every 622 mortgaged homes.” That’s a pretty sizeable piece of the real estate pie. Nationally, an an estimated 1.4 million foreclosed homes await sale while many more are expected to join in the wake of the $26 billion dollar mortgage settlement and the wave of pending foreclosures, long in limbo, that will suddenly become actionable.