U. S. foreclosure filings soared 81 per cent in 2008, while property owners continued to battle plummeting home prices and tighter mortgage lending guidelines.

In December, alone, filings jumped past 300,000, a 41-per-cent increase from the same month in 2007. "If we don't adopt a comprehensive national policy, we'll have five to eight million new foreclosed homes in the next three years," says Kenneth Rosen, chairman of the Fisher Center for real estate and Urban economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

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