Creditors filed fewer foreclosure lawsuits against Hawaii property owners last year, marking a second consecutive year of decreased volume since the state Legislature began overhauling rules for repossessing real estate from delinquent borrowers.

The number of new foreclosure lawsuits filed statewide decreased 12.4 percent to 1,826 last year from 2,084 the prior year, according to statistics from the state Judiciary.

Last year’s decrease generally correlates with other positive economic trends in Hawaii that include rising personal income, appreciating home values, low unemployment and fewer bankruptcies.

However, one company tracking other measures of foreclosure suggest that Hawaii isn’t faring as well as most other states.

Real estate information provider CoreLogic said Hawaii has the third-highest ratio of homes in some stage of the foreclosure process nationwide, suggesting that cases are slogging through the court system.

Irvine, Calif.-based CoreLogic said 2.4 percent of Hawaii homes were in foreclosure in December. Only New Jersey at 4.2 percent and New York at 3.5 percent had higher rates among all states whether the foreclosure process happens in court or out of court. The foreclosure rate nationally was 1.1 percent.

CoreLogic also said Hawaii fares worse than the national average for mortgages where payments are 90 days or more past due. Hawaii’s rate in this category of seriously delinquent mortgages was 3.9 percent. The national rate was 3.2 percent. Only 13 states, led by New Jersey at 7.5 percent, had higher rates than Hawaii.

Gary Dubin, a Hawaii attorney representing homeowners challenging foreclosures, said in an email that he has noticed a sizable increase in foreclosure cases on court calendars in every county and that his law firm is getting more requests for assistance.

Dubin also said some foreclosure cases aren’t tallied in the Judiciary statistics, such as cases initiated out of court by homeowners associations trying to collect unpaid maintenance fees. He also said a significant number of new cases have been delayed after RCO Hawaii LLLC, an affiliate of Bellevue, Wash.-based foreclosure law firm RCO Legal, closed last year.

“Foreclosures in Hawaii are increasing,” Dubin said on a recent episode of a radio show he hosts on foreclosure issues.

“There are also more law firms in Hawaii now bringing foreclosure cases and they have been adding attorneys,” he added in an email.

Since the late 1990s nearly all foreclosures in Hawaii had been conducted out of court. But the Legislature changed that in mid-2011 to require all foreclosure cases initiated by lenders be conducted in state Circuit Court.

The change was made in response to claims by consumer advocates that lenders were abusing Hawaii’s nonjudicial foreclosure process in the wake of the economic recession and mortgage market meltdown. To some extent the switch created a backlog and lengthened the time it took for a pile of troubled mortgages to be resolved because many foreclosures had to be restarted in court. State lawmakers also tweaked Hawaii’s foreclosure law in 2012 and 2014, imposing additional requirements on lenders that altered the flow of cases.