All told, the three-county region stretching from Manatee County to Charlotte County, registered 3,376 foreclosure filings last month — a 15 percent increase from February and a 57 percent increase from March 2009.

But the number of filings representing the start of the foreclosure process was down 10 percent to 1,538 from a year ago. At the same time, the number of filings that represent a bank seizing a property from a defaulting borrower was up nearly 300 percent from March 2009 to 622, according to data from California-based RealtyTrac Inc.

That could be a signal that foreclosures have been working their way through the system in much the same way that a rat is digested by a snake. By that analogy, the rodent bulge during March was a lot lower in the abdomen than it was last year.

March could represent a turning point in Southwest Florida’s admittedly volatile foreclosure situation, said Adam Robinson, a Sarasota real estate agent who tracks local foreclosure data.

Robinson’s data, which can be found at sarasotaforeclosures.com/blog, show there were only 366 initial foreclosure filings in Sarasota County in March, the first time that filings collected by Adams have dropped below 500 since September 2008.

“That either means fewer people are defaulting or banks are being more cooperative and less likely to file foreclosures,” Robinson said.

His data also show that the number of bank-owned properties has surged.

“There had been at least three times as many properties at the beginning of the foreclosure process as at the end of the process,” Robinson said. “But in March the ratio was nearly one to one.”

The same trend appears to be occurring on the national level, albeit in a less exaggerated way.

Data provided by RealtyTrac show that foreclosures across the country rose sharply in March, but the foreclosures in the system were more tilted toward the final stage of the process than they had been in the past.

There were 257,944 REOs — banking parlance for when a lender seizes a property — during the first quarter, a 9 percent increase from the previous quarter and a 35 percent increase from the same period a year earlier.

“This subtle shift in the numbers pushed REOs to the highest quarterly total we’ve ever seen in our report and may be further evidence that lenders are starting to make a dent in the backlog of distressed inventory that has built up over the last year as foreclosure prevention programs and processing delays slowed the normal foreclosure timeline,” said James J. Saccacio, RealtyTrac chief executive, in a statement.

Other observers of the region’s market have noticed a similar trend in Southwest Florida.

“It looks like banks are aggressively moving forward with foreclosures,” said George Huhn, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Venice. “They are realizing that demand for foreclosures is good. The bottom is in and people are stepping up to invest.”

Huhn expects total foreclosures to increase in the months ahead, but he said demand for those properties will rise and soak up the excess inventory.

Perry Corneau, who runs his own Sarasota real estate firm, sees a similar scenario.

“Banks have driven down prices to the point where people can’t ignore them any more,” Corneau said.

Demand for foreclosures and short-sale properties is so strong at the low end of the market that Corneau is having to write as many as four contracts to get one deal, he said.

“That’s because our offers are being beat out by other buyers,” Corneau said.

But Gary Jackson, an economics professor at Florida Gulf Coast University, cautioned that demand for real estate in Florida will still be tempered by the tepid recovery and the high unemployment rate.

“The numbers I have been tracking shows lis pendens filings coming down slowly,” Jackson said, meaning the first stage in the foreclosure process. “But it’s been very slow and there could be a bulge in the months ahead due to continued fears of unemployment and economic troubles.”

The big driver in Florida is population growth, Jackson said. “It was negative last year and this year growth will be slight,” he said. “It will take another two or three years to get back to normal.”

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