Central Oregon communities had foreclosure rates two to nine times higher than the state as a whole between 2008 and 2011, data released last week by the Oregon Department of Justice show.

Local real estate experts, state officials and housing advocates have long pointed to Central Oregon as one of the regions hardest hit by the economic collapse. But the new data paint the clearest picture to date of the scope of Central Oregon’s housing bust.

The nation’s five biggest commercial lenders — Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Ally Bank — foreclosed on 1,399 Bend homes from 2008 to 2011, according to the figures released by the Justice Department. To come up with a foreclosure rate, The Bulletin tallied up the total number of foreclosures in each community and calculated the number as a percentage of total homes, based on data from the 2010 U.S. Census.

Bend had 36,110 homes in 2010, so the data show that about 3.9 percent of Bend homes were foreclosed on during the period, according to The Bulletin’s calculation.

Oregon’s foreclosure rate over that time was 1.4 percent, using the same method.

Other smaller Central Oregon communities had higher rates. Redmond saw 531 foreclosures, or 4.8 percent of all homes in that time frame. Prineville, with 209 foreclosures, had a 5 percent rate. Sisters and La Pine had rates of 6.8 percent and 13.1 percent, respectively.

None of the lenders was willing to discuss the foreclosure rates or what activity the region might see moving forward.

Officials with the Justice Department, which received the data from lenders and compiled them into a database, said the figures come with a caveat: Lenders reported the foreclosure numbers by ZIP code, so Justice Department staffers had to pore through the data to check for errors. The five lenders disclosed the numbers as part of their $25 billion settlement with the federal government and 49 states attorneys general in March over questionable foreclosure practices.

But the real foreclosure rates in Central Oregon and across the state are likelyhigher. The five major lenders hold about 70 percent of the country’s mortgages, according to mortgagestats.com, a website that tracks mortgage lending and is owned by the publisher of American Banker, The Bond Buyer and other financial publications. Other homes were likely foreclosed on by smaller lenders, not included in the report.

Local real estate officials and housing advocates said the data just confirmed what they have seen and sensed over the last four years.

“I’m not surprised at all to see data that says we have some of the highest foreclosure rates,” said Laura Fritz, housing director with the regional nonprofit NeighborImpact.

When home prices started dropping in the second half of 2007 and collapsed over the next year, “we just got hit really hard, really quickly. So many people lost so much value in their homes.”

Even the state, when calculating where to spend foreclosure-prevention funding, indirectly identified Deschutes as the hardest-hit county in Oregon, one of the nation’s 17 hardest-hit states.

NeighborImpact, which handled prevention in Central Oregon, provided foreclosure counseling and prevention workshops for 420 Central Oregon homeowners between July 1, 2011, and June 30, 2012, Fritz said, down a bit from the 447 it saw from July 2010 to June 2011.

Central Oregon’s foreclosure numbers stand in contrast with other cities around the state.

Portland saw 3,264 foreclosures from 2008 to 2011, or 1.2 percent of the city’s total homes. Medford had a rate of 2.5 percent. Salem of 1.9 percent, and Eugene of 0.9 percent over the same time.

While no lenders wanted to comment on the foreclosure data, Wells Fargo spokesman Jim Hines said in an email, “We can’t speculate on future foreclosure activity or on reasons why Central Oregon was so hard hit by the housing crisis. In general, we’ve found that frequent causes for delinquency and foreclosure are job loss, illness, change in marital status and death.”

Officials with Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank and Ally Financial did not respond to requests for comment.

The region’s building and homebuying frenzy between 2003 and 2007 may have played the biggest role in the area’s crash.

In 2006, the Bend Metropolitan Statistical Area, which covers all of Deschutes County, led the nation in home-value appreciation. Four years later, the Bend MSA again led the nation — this time in home-value depreciation, according to Federal Housing Finance Agency data.

Megan Burgess, an attorney specializing in real estate and foreclosure issues with Peterkin and Associates in Bend, said she’s noticed a common trend among the distressed homeowners coming to see her.

“The foreclosures are coming largely from people who bought around the peak purchasing time, in 2005, ’06 and ’07,” Burgess said.

In Bend, the real estate boom was the subject of national attention from publications like the The New York Times and The Economist.

Indeed, the median price of a Bend home shot up from $240,000 in April of 2005 to $396,000 in May of 2007, according to figures compiled by the Bratton Appraisal Group.

By mid-2009, the median was down to about $220,000. And it kept dropping, down to a low of $166,000 in November 2011, just 42 percent of peak value.

Factor in huge job losses from the Great Recession — Deschutes County lost nearly 10,000 jobs between 2007 and 2009, according to Oregon Employment Department figures — and it’s no wonder homeowners found they could no longer afford mortgage payments, Burgess said.

When home values dropped, “suddenly, people were being told that their property was worth $100,000, $200,000, even $300,000 less than what they owed on it,” she said.

With Redmond’s population doubling from 2000 to 2010, new subdivisions were popping up on the city’s outer edges, said Kris Rees, a broker with Coldwell Banker Mayfield Realty in Redmond.

The city issued 778 permits for new single-family homes in 2005, according to Bratton figures, or about 65 new home permits per month.

The demand from a growing population drove up prices: Medians rose from $166,000 at the start of 2005 to $289,000 by November 2006.

But the swiftness of the crash is evident from the drop in new building activity. Redmond issued 307 new home permits between January 2008 and August 2012. That 4 1/2-year total equals 39 percent of the number recorded in 2005 alone.

“Right at the height of the market, we had a number of subdivisions that had just been built, or were getting started,” Rees said.

When the momentum stopped, new buyers lost their homes to foreclosure just a few years later, she said.