In previous years, the loan limits tied the four Wasatch Front counties of Weber, Davis, Salt Lake and Utah together, said Dwight Peterson, Salt Lake City field office director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

However, this time, the government changed its criteria and chose to separate Utah County from the Salt Lake metro statistical area, Peterson said.

Antoine attributed the change to revised grouping criteria, which he said were based on commuting patterns. The change put Utah County outside of the Salt Lake metro statistical area, resulting in lower loan limits.

The number of Utah homeowners who received a foreclosure filing in June jumped nearly 141 percent, compared with the same month last year, according to a report this month from RealtyTrac.

The most dramatic increase came from Utah County, where the Provo/Orem area ranked 37th among metro areas nationwide in the rate of foreclosures. The Provo/Orem area had an 810 percent increase in foreclosure filings from June 2007 to June 2008. Overall, Utah ranked 10th among the states in the rate of foreclosure filings.

University of Utah economist James Wood and Antoine believe that the high rate of foreclosures is not connected to the loan-limit changes, since those limits were revised in March, and foreclosures can take many more months to process.

Wood said the highest percentage of problem loans likely to become delinquent were people in the subprime category.

"The troublesome ones really are the subprimes that are resetting, because you have people who were already in fragile economic condition in their personal finances," Wood said. He estimated that there are about 56,000 subprime loans in Utah.

He said a big chunk of the Utah County foreclosures were in the northern part of the county.

"You had young families getting into large starter homes and getting in over their heads," he said. "Their economic balance sheets were considerably weaker. They were just really vulnerable."

Mortgage brokers also point to the lax lending standards prevalent during the housing market run-up as a cause of the soaring foreclosure numbers.

"We had gotten to the point where we were giving 'pulse loans,"' said Dave Barton, co-owner of Rocky Mountain Mortgage in Provo. "If you had a pulse, you got a loan."

Now that lending standards have become stricter, some people who are trying to refinance are finding it tougher to so do.

"Has the industry shrunk and made it more difficult to refinance? Yes. Have home prices leveled off and in some areas gone down? Yes," Barton said. "But it's the combination of the two that makes it more difficult for people to go in and refinance."

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E-mail: jlee@desnews.com