Georgia leapfrogged past Arizona, Florida, California and Nevada to post the nation's highest state foreclosure rate in May, the first time since February 2006 that Georgia's foreclosure rate has ranked highest among the states.

Metro Atlanta has the second highest rate.         

Nationwide, foreclosure filings -- default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions -- were reported on 205,990 U.S. properties in May, an increase of 9 percent from April but still down 4 percent from May 2011. The report also shows one in every 639 U.S. housing units with a foreclosure filing during the month.

A look at the county-by-county foreclosure rates drives home the enormity of that change. Metro Atlanta's inner-core counties have certainly been hit hard by foreclosures. In Fulton, one in 272 housing units was in foreclosure in May; in DeKalb it was even worse, with one in 234 units under foreclosure. In Cobb, it was one in 337, better than the Georgia average but twice as bad as the national average.

As high as those rates might seem, however, they pale in comparison to foreclosure rates in the metro region’s outer ring of counties, many of them with reputations as prosperous communities:

Cherokee County: One in 225 units.
Rockdale County: One in 179 units.
Douglas County: One in 122 units.
Henry County: One in 157 units.
Walton County: One in 143 units.