Foreclosures hit another record high in August: 304,000 homes were in default and 91,000 families lost their houses.

More than 770,000 homes have been repossessed by lenders since August 2007, when the credit crunch took hold.

Foreclosure filings of all kinds, including notices of defaults, notices of auctions and bank repossessions, grew 12% in August over July, and 27% compared with August 2007.

The 27% jump over last August represents a more modest year-over-year increase than in previous months, but that’s only because the housing crisis was already underway in August 2007, which saw a big spike in foreclosures.

States including Nevada once again had the highest rate of filings in the nation. One of every 91 households, or 11,706 families, received a foreclosure notice of some kind during the month, and more than 4,000 others lost their homes.

More than 101,000 Californians received foreclosure notices, which comes to about one in every 130 households, while more than 33,000 people there lost their homes. Arizona had the third-highest rate with one out of every 182 households in default.

All of these states saw tremendous home price run-ups during the boom, which meant that many buyers had to use exotic, risky loans in order to be able to afford a home. These mortgages include subprime, hybrid adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs) that feature two or three years of low introductory rates before the loans reset to higher, often unaffordable levels and cause borrowers to default.

In some of the other hard hit states, such as Michigan (which had one filing for every 332 households) and Ohio (one filing per 444 households), which never saw a housing boom, delinquencies are being driven by fundamental economic woes like unemployment, rather than pricey real estate.

Eight of the top 10 worst performing metro areas were in California. Stockton, in the Central Valley, had the highest rate in the nation with one in every 50 households receiving a foreclosure filing during the month.

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