It can go up as many times as the homeowners fall behind or the bank has to start all over again.

The homeowners can miss payments and the bank will sue them for foreclosure. If they can then make up the payments, the house will be out of foreclosure. If the homeowners fall behind again, the bank can sue them again. Etc.

Also, the bank can postpone the sheriff sale date of the house as many times as they want. A house can appear in the paper for sale, and the bank can postpone it, which would require them to republish the new sale date. Lenders usually postpone sale dates because the homeowners think they’ve found some solution to stop foreclosure, like refinancing, or selling the property. Some will postpone the sale just because the foreclosure victims call up crying and begging for more time.

Most likely, if the sale date keeps getting pushed back, the homeowners are persuading the bank to give them more time. They can call the lender, give some story to a different customer service rep every time, and they’ll postpone the sale. It’s a great way to save up money and work on various solutions to save the home. The bank doesn’t really care that much, since they have other properties in foreclosure that won’t request more time, and they don’t see any gains from foreclosure anyway.

In my area, there is no limit to the number of times a home can go into foreclosure.

The foreclosure process is stopped when the owner makes the payments current. Somehow at the last minute, they are coming up with the money to stop foreclosure.

No limit….They save themselves by making some payments at the last minute

They pay the arrears. Its the only way to stop a forclosure. Or they may be grant deeding a percentage of the house to other people and then having them file for bankrupcty. That can stall a foreclosure for about 6 months.

As long as the bank (or tax district) is willing to back out of the foreclosure sale, I bet there is no law that limits the number of times.

At a foreclosure auction the bank finds themselves needing to bid up to the loan pay-off amount and if someone was willing to pay that the home would have never gone to foreclosure. This means that the banks almost always end up buying the house at the foreclosure auction.

Owning and taking care of the house is expensive for the bank so if they believe that it can be avoided they want to do so.