We all know Tampa Bay foreclosures have reached nightmare proportions, but getting an accurate number is harder than it looks.

Last month RealtyTrac, the California real estate company, released a chart showing that 62,719 Tampa Bay properties got foreclosures filings last year. RealtyTrac took pains to avoid double counting properties with more than one filing over the year. Or so it said.

But here comes the Florida Supreme Court with a smaller - but still high - number. Court administrators didn't break out Tampa Bay's four counties on their spread sheet, so I kindly did the math. I got a grand total of 49,843 foreclosure filings for Pinellas, Pasco, Hillsborough and Hernando counties.

Here's a link to the Supreme Court tally (The 2009 numbers are on the bottom): Download Supremecourtforeclosure

Who's correct? I'm still trying to figure that out. But the discrepancy is greater than it appears since RealtyTrac supposedly counts properties, while the state in some cases counts multiple filings on single properties.

I'd appreciate your opinions. My first instinct is to trust the state more than RealtyTrac. But local isn't always better.

UPDATE: RealtyTrac offered what seems like a sound explanation. It said the Supreme Court counts only Lis Pendens, the initial foreclosure lawsuits, and not additional filings. So all the properties hit with initial foreclosure suits in late 2008 - and hit with followup foreclosure filings in 2009 - would appear on the RealtyTrac list but not the Supreme Court list. Here's a RealtyTrac spokesman:

If you just break out our Lis Pendens numbers in 2009 we show 53,290 for the four counties in the Tampa Bay metro area: Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas. That is a difference of about 6 percent, which I believe can be explained by some small differences in methodology between us and the Supreme Court as well as just the inherent margin of error that comes when dealing with public record data