MARIETTA — Cobb County foreclosures continue to add up, with 973 notices submitted to the Marietta Daily Journal this month for the July foreclosure auction.

That’s slightly higher — 2 percent more — than the 954 notices submitted for the July 2011 sale.

If there is any silver lining, however, it’s that the number of properties listed for foreclosure this year is down 29 percent from a year ago. The total number of foreclosures year-to-date is 5,916. For the same time period in 2011, there were 8,347 notices submitted.

Legal notices for foreclosures must appear on four consecutive Fridays before a property can be sold at auction on the Cobb Superior Courthouse steps in Marietta. Foreclosure sales begin at 10 a.m. on the first Tuesday of the month. The next sale is July 3.

According to RealtyTrac, Georgia had the highest rate of foreclosures in May in the United States. It also reported that metro Atlanta was second in the nation among the largest metro areas.

But overall, recent data suggests that the foreclosure crisis seems to have reached its peak and is starting to slow down.

The Kennesaw-based foreclosure research firm Equity Depot reported this week that foreclosure notices are down 12.4 percent in the first half of 2012 compared to last year.

In metro Atlanta, Gwinnett County by far leads the area with 10,353 notices this year, followed by Fulton County (8,695) and DeKalb County (7,650). Cobb is fourth on the list.

The data looks promising, said Marietta real estate broker Wendy Bunch of Re/Max Around Atlanta.

“The banks are really trying to work with people to keep them in their houses versus getting them to the point of foreclosures,” said Bunch, president-elect of the Cobb Association of Realtors. “Over the past couple of years, the banks are realizing if we could try to work with people on a short sale or modify their loan to keep them in their home, we’re going to come out better and so are they.”