From the Sacramento Bee: Every business day in the region an average of 85 people lost their homes to lenders, near double the number of foreclosures from June, according to Fair Oaks-based Foreclosures.com, a Web site for real estate investors.
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"I don't think we are seeing the worst of these numbers," said Robert Kleinhenz, deputy chief economist for the California Association of Realtors. Kleinhenz and others said they expect high foreclosure numbers to continue for at least another six months.DataQuick Stats by County
DataQuick Stats by Zip

From the Sacramento Bee: As foreclosures continue to grow in the capital-area real estate market, Sacramento and Elk Grove are copying a trend launched last year in Stockton: bus tours of bank-owned homes. As the buying season begins, three tours are planned for Feb. 23. There's one for investors in Sacramento and two for first-time buyers and investors in Elk Grove.
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From the Sacramento Bee: Banks repossessed nearly 5,300 homes in the capital region during the first three months of 2008, setting a record and pushing the region's foreclosure tally to more than 15,300 since the beginning of 2007....The number of home loan defaults also neared 10,000 during the quarter in Amador, Nevada, El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties, according to La Jolla-based DataQuick Information Systems.

Those defaults...hint at thousand more foreclosures in months to come. Altogether, the region has now seen about 34,000 home loan defaults since January 2007, according to DataQuick. From DQNews: Last quarter's default numbers were a record in almost all of the state's 58 counties.
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Foreclosure resales have emerged as a significant market factor, accounting for 33.1 percent of all California resale activity last quarter. A year ago it was 3.2 percent. Foreclosure resales vary significantly by area, from 5.1 percent in San Francisco County to 66.7 percent in San Joaquin County.
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A look at Sacramento real estate market numbers for November:

• Sacramento Real Estate Statistics Blog
• Sacramento Real Estate Blog
  

From the Sacramento Bee:"We're still climbing to a peak in foreclosure activity in California," said DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage. "We don't even have a sign of the peak."
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From the Central Valley Business Times: Central Valley cities are among the most likely places in the nation to see home prices decline in the next two years, according to a report Tuesday from the PMI Group Inc. (NYSE: PMI), a Walnut Creek-based writer of mortgage insurance. The most likely place in the country is Naples, Fla., in PMI’s opinion, but Stockton and Merced are tied as the fifth most likely locations for price declines.

From the Central Valley Business Times: Five of the top ten [California] counties for foreclosures last month were in the Central Valley, led by San Joaquin County with 1,000 homes going on the auction block, a 700 percent increase over the number a year earlier. Stanislaus County is ranked third in the state on a per capita basis with Sacramento County fourth, Yolo County fifth and Merced County seventh, according to the computations by ForeclosureRadar.From the Central Valley Business Times: The Stockton metro area in the Central Valley had the nation’s second-highest home foreclosure rate last year among the nation's 100 largest metro areas, says a new report from RealtyTrac Inc. of Irvine, a foreclosure information company. With 4.866 percent of its households entering some stage of foreclosure during the year, Stockton saw a total of 22,184 foreclosure filings on 10,608 properties, up 271 percent from 2006, RealtyTrac says.
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From the Sacramento Bee:[W]ith 12,000-plus "For Sale" signs in the region, the market hasn't yet reached bottom, said ReMax's [Randy] Dunham. At month's end there were 12,606 homes for sale in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties, according to Sacramento-based researcher TrendGraphix. The peak in August 2007 was 16,262.
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"Borrowers are more cautious about what they can afford," said Michele Dillingham, a senior loan consultant at Sacramento-based Vitek Mortgage. "A lot of people are buying at below what they would qualify for. They saw what happened (with foreclosures) and don't want it to happen to them."DataQuick stats by county
DataQuick stats by zip (or xls)

From Home Front: Is this sustainable?

Some January price statistics for Sacramento County via the Sacramento Real Estate blog:

• Median: -27.5% YoY
• Average: -28.4% YoY
• Price per square foot: -27% YoY

From the Stockton Record:

A second major foreclosed-home auction will be coming to Stockton next week, with about 85 Stockton-area houses going up for sale at the San Joaquin County Fairgrounds.
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"The sellers are motivated, but they're not going to just dump the properties on the market," company spokesman Joe Joffrion said.
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From Fortune: If your business suffers from real estate blues brought on by plummeting prices, it may come as little comfort to know that this trend was supposed to have ended by now. When the market began its downturn in early 2006, some of the smartest economists in the country, as well as the CEOs of major home-builders and the National Association of Realtors, predicted that prices would rebound by mid-2007. Instead the experts have been humbled by the depth and breadth of the downturn - and the resulting sub-prime credit crisis has shaken financial markets around the world. Expect tremors to keep shaking the real estate market along multiple fault lines in 2008.
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As a whole, the national housing market will finally hit bottom - and start bouncing back - at the end of 2008, says Celia Chen, director of housing economics at Economy.com....

From the Central Valley Business Times:Apartment rental rates held steady in the third quarter, despite people being forced out of their homes by foreclosures, says RealFacts, a Novato-based database publisher specializing in the multifamily housing market. Even in the Central Valley’s San Joaquin County, which has seen one of the nation’s highest per capita default and foreclosure rates, rents have increased just 2.6 percent year-over-year, with occupancy rates essentially unchanged, says RealFacts.
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From the Modesto Bee:

Alliance Title Co. went out of business, laid off all its employees and closed its doors Thursday. At least 30 employees in Stanislaus County, plus hundreds more elsewhere in the state, lost their jobs with less than one day's notice.
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Terry Harwell, division president for Alliance in Stanislaus County...said he was shocked to hear his four offices -- three in Modesto and one in Turlock -- were being closed and that he and everyone else was being let go. "We're the market-share leader in Stanislaus County, so it didn't seem viable that they would close us down," Harwell said. "We were on pace to break even this month."
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From the Sacramento Bee (hat tip anon1137):In an unprecedented move designed to save thousands of California homeowners from foreclosure, Gov.

From the Sacramento Bee: California's severe housing downturn claimed another fixture of the Sacramento-area homebuilding industry Wednesday when John D. Reynen, co-founder of Reynen & Bardis Communities, filed for personal bankruptcy protection...It's the second major bankruptcy-protection filing involving a privately owned land developer and builder in the capital region.
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The company, formed more than 30 years ago, has largely shut down homebuilding and recently laid off about half of its 180 employees.Press release available via Home Front.

From the Sacramento Bee:
During the first three months of the year, banks repossessed a record-shattering 5,278 homes in the Sacramento region, La Jolla-based DataQuick Information Systems said Tuesday. Put another way: The area's first-quarter foreclosures already are half of last year's entire total.
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From CNN Money:Mortgage delinquencies will continue to rise over the next six to 12 months as home prices decline and economic conditions remain difficult, according to one forecast released Monday. The Core Mortgage Risk Monitor (CMRM), an index of foreclosure risk compiled by real estate data analyzer First American CoreLogic, increased 16% compared with the same period last year.
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From the Sacramento Bee:Bubble bursts in Elk Grove

Elk Grove, already mired in an economic slump, may be at the forefront of what's coming to the entire Sacramento region. Already home foreclosures there are up fivefold. Unemployment has climbed. Vacancies at small strip malls are three times the regionwide average, and Laguna Ridge – a big new master-planned development – is largely a ghost town of unsold homes and vacant lots.
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The downturn calls into question just how strong the boom really was. Rising prices enabled an untold number of residents to tap their home equity to buy sport-utility vehicles and other consumer goods. But others did well just to buy a house. They were wealthy on paper but chronically short of cash.

From the Modesto Bee:Northern San Joaquin Valley home prices have plummeted, but they haven't fallen enough to become affordable for most wage earners, a new study shows. Home buyers must earn about $98,000 a year to comfortably afford a median-priced house in Stanislaus County, the Center for Housing Policy reports. But workers in only one of the 64 occupations studied -- construction managers -- earned that much last year. Even two-income couples with good jobs -- such as accountants, police officers, school teachers and firefighters -- barely can cover ownership costs, the report showed.
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In calculating what's affordable, the study assumed not more than 28 percent of household income should pay the mortgage, property taxes and insurance. It also assumed buyers had a 10 percent down payment with a conventional loan.
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From the Sacramento Bee:Scared by growing numbers of bank-owned houses and for-sale signs in their neighborhoods, a handful of local cities are launching moves to help homeowners threatened with foreclosure. Their initiatives so far are limited to offering advice. Nobody's opening up the checkbook to bail out homeowners.
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"We don't know how far this is going to go," says Jim Lynch, community enhancement manager in Citrus Heights. "We've had housing setbacks over my 35 years, but I've never seen this many bank-owned properties and so many foreclosures."

From the Sacramento Bee: For new and existing homes combined: Sacramento County's October median sales price fell to $299,500. That's the first dip below $300,000 as the price slump continues and the lowest median price since April 2004. Sales prices have now fallen 22.6 percent from their August 2005 peak of $387,000, DataQuick reported.
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From the Sacramento Bee: Sacramento-area home builders can be excused for cheering the end of 2007. Now their problem is 2008. Statistics released today by the Folsom-based Gregory Group show builders closed 2007 with just 1,320 fourth-quarter sales in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. It was the lowest quarterly tally since the Gregory Group began counting sales in the fourth quarter of 1999. Sales for the full year were the lowest in a decade.
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Builders in 2007 sold 7,407 homes in the six-county region, the Gregory Group reported. That was 2,181 fewer than in 2006 and the fewest sales since 1997, when Sacramento was coming out of the 1990s housing downturn.
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From the Stockton Record:

Can't make your auto payment? Light your car on fire, and tell the insurance company you were a victim of theft. That's what a local prosecutor says he's seeing more of these days. But instead of chasing down a phantom arsonist, oftentimes he charges the car owner with insurance fraud.

A symptom of the overall economy - a troubled housing market and high gas prices - auto arsons in San Joaquin County have doubled in the past three years, according to the state Department of Insurance.
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From the Sacramento Bee: [T]here's no doubt the steep drop in home values – median prices in Sacramento County are almost 28 percent below last year's figures – and relatively low interest rates have sparked interest. [DataQuick's Andrew] LePage said investor buys accounted for 18.6 percent of February closings in Sacramento County. That's up significantly from 12.7 percent in November and December. [The high for investor buys was May 2004 when they accounted for 25 percent of sales.]
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Overall, sales remained weak, though real estate broker Tom Zipp of Citrus Heights said Thursday that rising investor activity "traditionally signals the bottom part of the market."DQ stats by county (All Homes & Existing SFH/Condos/New Homes)
DQ stats by zip code

From the Sacramento Bee:

In the most ominous indicator yet of the capital region's struggling housing market, January saw nearly as many people lose their homes as buy them. January's 1,815 closed escrows in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Yolo and Yuba counties was only 33 more than the 1,782 foreclosures recorded in the same counties that month, according to statistics from La Jolla-based DataQuick Information Systems of La Jolla and Foreclosures.com. of Fair Oaks.
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From the Sacramento Bee: The NBA's longest active sellout streak officially ended at Arco Arena Tuesday with the Kings setting a home opener low for Arco, as well as recording the league's worst attendance for a home opener this season...The announced attendance of 14,908 ended the Kings' streak of 354 consecutive sellouts dating back to Nov. 26, 1999. Arco seats 17,317.
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"That's sad and embarrassing," said Brandon Castillo, a season-ticket holder and Sacramento political consultant. "I was shocked when I walked in. It was empty. I couldn't believe it."
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Monterey Village Getting Shredded - photos & video at the Sacramento Real Statistics blog

From the Wall Street Journal: Cities and counties with some of the worst fallout from the nation's housing slump also are seeing a sharp upswing in vacant homes, a trend economists say might set up further declines in home prices. The national homeowner vacancy rate, which gauges the number of vacant homes on the market, rose to 2.8% in the fourth quarter, according to Census Bureau data.
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Vacancies...jumped in some once-booming Western cities. Between 2005 and 2007, homeowner vacancies more than tripled to 3.8% from 1.2% in the Riverside-San Bernardino area, part of California's Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles. In the Sacramento area, vacancies jumped to 4.2% from 1.2%.Interactive Map - We beat Detroit!

From the Modesto Bee: Monica Granados regularly encounters people who aren't even trying to fight foreclosure in San Joaquin County. Granados is a process server who delivers eviction notices to houses repossessed by lenders.
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From the Granite Bay PT: Michael Lyon, chief executive officer for Lyon Real Estate...told the audience the market has changed drastically. In 2001 about 800 homes were sold throughout Placer County in about a month. "Today there are about 2,460 homes for sale in Placer County and only about 219 are sold each month," he said.

From the Sacramento Bee:When times get tough, the tough ... take a sabbatical. That's the philosophy of developer Martin Tuttle, who is temporarily leaving his VP post with Sacramento builder New Faze Development.
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Tuttle says his wife's job offer came at the right time – just as the tough housing market forced New Faze to reduce its staff by about one-third, through layoffs and attrition.
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From the Appeal Democrat: Six people are expected to lose their jobs and funding to 25 others cut back as the impact of the housing slump hits home in Yuba County. The Community Development and Services Agency Director Kevin Mallen said he had anticipated the slump and began closing positions when vacancies occurred in order to absorb the effects, but not all employees were safe. "This is directly tied to the volume of work. Building permits are off," Mallen said...In 2006, during the housing boom, the building department was issuing 1,200 permits; about 30 permits have been issued each month for the last six months.From the Sacramento Bee: Far removed from billion-dollar writedowns and the subprime meltdown, the Sacramento area's community banks appear to have escaped the worst of the housing slump. But they aren't immune, either. The downturn in real estate and the overall economy has cut into their profits just like the big banks. Although they largely sidestepped subprime lending, many are bracing for losses on loans to construction firms, subcontractors and suppliers.