Lenders foreclosed on nearly 99,000 properties in eight metro Atlanta counties through November of this year, a toxic tidal wave swamping home values in a region that went from ceaseless boom to endless gloom in a few years.

A crash in housing led the nation into the Great Recession, and a recovery in housing will help to lead it back out. But is the market recovering? The numbers and the experts say: Not yet. And perhaps not soon.

John Adams, the chief tax appraiser in Cherokee County, says he has heard predictions of a comeback. But he's not seeing it from the early appraisals his staff is turning in for 2011.

"Everybody thought that by now at least we would be on a pretty steady upward swing, but I am not sure that it's got there yet," Adams said. "We can't even tell if it is going to be flat or down 10 percent or anything. I just would not count on much being up."

Barry Bramlett, whose company Equity Depot tracks foreclosures, says the extraordinary number this year -- Equity Depot counted 98,662 -- may not be the crest of the wave.

"I don't see a drop in the number of foreclosures anytime soon," Bramlett said.

The housing market is under pressure from several directions: The subprime mortgage collapse that started the recession is still washing out of the system; the spike in unemployment has spawned a new wave of defaults and foreclosures; and foreclosures themselves are a cancer on their neighborhoods.

If the bank is forced to take your neighbor's house, it typically will try to sell the house rather than sit on an asset that is producing nothing and costing it money in maintenance and handling. The lender may take a loss on such sales, but the real losers are you and your other neighbors. The "bank sale" next door has undermined the value of your house even if you've never missed a payment and done all your upkeep.

So the key, real estate experts say, is for new buyers to soak up those distressed properties and slowly return the market to stability.

People like Lin Wormley may hold that key.

Wormley, 31, of Marietta, is shopping for a foreclosed-upon home in the Dunwoody and Alpharetta areas.

"I have always been told from back in my college days that you want to get something that always appreciates," Wormley said.

Foreclosures, short sales and and the unmeasurable pool of homeowners desperate to sell because they are teetering on the edge of foreclosure -- all those factors are pushing values down. Regular sellers have to compete against bargain basement prices to move property, and most new home builders have stopped building because they cannot match the prices.

Wormley figures that, if the market is at or near the bottom in price, his investment will have no place to go but up.

"We are just to the point now that it seems like there is definitely more on the market with foreclosures where you might be able to find more for your dollar," he said.

So he decided now could be the perfect time to buy.

Jan Baker, a vice president with Prudential Georgia Realty, sees signs of hope in the sales numbers coming in. About 2,400 of Prudential's 4,510 home sales through November were sales of distressed properties. The fact that makes up 60 percent of Prudential's sales shows that buyers are soaking up some of the excess.

Four and more years ago, when Atlanta's housing market was all growth all the time, a sale involving a foreclosure or a short sale was the exception for the average agent, Baker said.

"I could name those agents in my area that specialized in [distressed sales]," she said.

Now, each of Prudential's agents in its 21 metro Atlanta offices has been trained in the more complex task of buying foreclosures and educated on how to hand-hold buyers through the document-heavy, protracted process, Baker said.

Foreclosures and other distressed sales are being absorbed, but there is more coming onto the market monthly, in record numbers.

For example, Gwinnett County's foreclosures have exploded since the salad days of the county's extraordinary expansion. In 2003, the county had 4,735 foreclosures, according to Equity Depot. Through November of this year, Gwinnett listed 24,483.

Fulton had 8,111 foreclosures in 2003 and 22,623 so far this year.

Those who track sales from real estate offices and as part of number crunching businesses are seeing light on the horizon, perhaps a year or more out.

Gainesville's Norton Agency works mostly across metro Atlanta's northern arc of counties from Gwinnett to Cherokee, has dealt in real estate for 82 years and produces sales and trend analyses for North Georgia.

CEO Frank Norton Jr. said investors are beginning to return to the real estate market, and banks are staffing up for short sales where they have discovered they can make more money than if they let a house go into foreclosure.

Norton has watched the market work its way through the waves of foreclosures. The first wave was dominated by builders turning over unsold houses. The second wave came from people who lost their jobs.

Now, his agency is seeing another job-related wave, people who are turning over homes because they were overextended financially from depending on bonuses or overtime pay to help them make budgets.

Norton thinks sales will continue to bump along through 2011 and start a slow climb back in 2012. It could be 2017 or maybe as late as 2020 before the market reaches its "new normal," which will be healthy sales but will incorporate an evolving idea of the American home. He thinks there is a shift back to simpler, less expansive homes without dramatic spaces such as cathedral ceilings, for instance.

Adams, the Cherokee County's chief tax appraiser, says he thinks less about the future than the here and now, and the present for homeowners is still sobering.

"We might see one neighborhood's values holding steady, while five miles up the road another is going gangbusters," Adams said.

But that is tempered by lower values in another nearby neighborhood.

"Maybe something swings back [up], but then we'll see a batch that is selling 10 to 15 percent below value," he said.

And the specter of foreclosures is always present. Bramlett said the cascading foreclosures will continue.

"We don't expect to see a slowdown over the next year or two," he said.

Foreclosures

County     2003    By Nov. 2010    % increase

Gwinnett      4,735  24,483   417%

Fulton           8,111 22,623   179%

DeKalb       8,157 17,850   118%

Cobb           3,781   13,834  265%

Clayton      3,404  9,676   184%

Cherokee  1,131    4,843   328%

Forsyth          666 3,468   421%

Fayette           561 1,885    236%