Persistent unemployment remains a factor in the area’s foreclosure listings, according to a University of North Texas economics expert.

Terry Clower, a professor of applied economics, said that while people can face foreclosure as soon as they become three months behind in their mortgage, in practice, having one’s home listed for foreclosure often takes longer than that.

Both the state and local unemployment rates for September were released Friday, on the heels of the latest residential foreclosure listings for November.

Local unemployment for September remains at 7.7 percent for the county and 6.5 percent for the city, about the level it had been all summer. Meanwhile, November foreclosure listings were up 35 percent from the same time last year.

At 600 listings, however, that number is down for Denton County from an all-time high of 710 last month, according to the Foreclosure Listing Service Inc.

Clower said the good news in the latest numbers is that conditions do not appear to be getting worse.

“We may have hit bottom,” Clower said.

But the bad news is that as the economy turns around, labor rates are the nearly last to recover; until they do, people will continue to lose their houses, Clower said.

Texas lost 44,700 jobs in September, according to the Texas Workforce Commission.

When a homeowner is un­employed or underemployed for a long time, the family burns through savings and other resources, and the possibility of losing their home to foreclosure increases, Clower said.

He said he’s questioned for several years whether the region had enough high-paying jobs to support the amount of high-end houses being built, even in the suburbs. Generally, a monthly mortgage payment should be about one-third of a family’s take-home pay.

“Much has been made of the reworks of people’s mortgages,” Clower said. “But even after that, about half of them [homeowners] are in the same position they were before down the road. It’s still more house than they can afford.”

Area economists believe the regional economy will turn around in the first quarter of 2010, Clower said.

Energy prices could drive more drilling for natural gas. In addition, as the overall economy recovers, construction could resume on otherwise slow-moving projects, such as Rayzor Ranch, he said. With that, construction jobs, and then retail jobs, would follow.

Although there would be a lag, recovery in other industries would follow, such as trucking, he said.

Peterbilt recently announced that it closed its plant in Ten­nessee, making Denton’s the company’s only U.S. manufacturing plant.

Meanwhile, foreclosure postings are expected to reach record levels for the four-county region. With 5,554 foreclosure listings posted for November — the seventh time this year that a month’s listings have exceeded 5,000 — the region is on pace to easily top 60,000 postings this year, according to George Roddy Sr., president of Foreclosure Listing Service.

Not all the listings translate into actual foreclosures, since some homes get listed more than once. Homeowners can sometimes catch up on payments or stay the loss of their home by filing for bankruptcy, according to Bonnie Brown of Foreclosure Listing Service.

For example, Denton County will see about 6,700 listings this year, Brown said. But fewer than 300 of those homes will be bought by third parties at the foreclosure auction.

“A little over 2,500 of those listings will be homes seized by the bank,” Brown said.

Since 2000, foreclosure listings have more than tripled in the region. By November of 2000, just 12,246 homes were posted for foreclosure in Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton counties. In 2009, 56,423 homes those counties have been listed so far.

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com.