foreclosure rate fell from second in the country to 52nd in January.

And not a single metro area across Florida managed to crack the top 20.

Those bright spots are among the details of a report released today by RealtyTrac, an Irvine, Calif.-based real estate data company.

But it's not that solvency is suddenly breaking out in the Sunshine State - once ground zero for the nation's foreclosure crisis, said Daren Blomquist, marketing communications manager for RealtyTrac.

"We still think the numbers will bounce back to higher levels," he said, because mainly what's happened is that the state's been hit harder than the rest of the country by a wave of alleged improprieties in the way lenders and their lawyers handled foreclosures.

"It's a delay in the foreclosure as opposed to a long-term cessation," Blomquist said. "The big question is how long that delay is going to be. We've already seen some other states starting to come back from the artificial trough."

The numbers are striking: Lee County had one foreclosure filing for every 428 housing units, down 35 percent from December and 71 percent from January 2010.

Las Vegas, by contrast, kept its iron grip on the No. 1 position with one filing per 82 homes. That's only 13 percent off December's rate and half a percentage point more than January 2010.

RealtyTrac counts a wide variety of events in the foreclosure process, including default notices, actual foreclosure lawsuits, notices of public foreclosure auctions and notices of sales of properties that have been foreclosed on and repurchased by a bank.

Michael Timmerman, a Naples-based senior associate with Fishkind & Associates, an Orlando-based economic consulting firm, said he's not so sure Lee's foreclosure rate will come back as Blomquist predicts.

For one thing, he said, "Florida has run through the foreclosure process more efficiently. We're flushing through foreclosures much faster than the other states."

Also, Timmerman said, the volume of home sales has increased dramatically in the past year. That's allowed banks to resolve some distressed properties with other methods such as short sales, in which the lender agrees to give up part of the mortgage balance so the house can be sold at market price.