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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Jim Wasserman in the Sacramento Bee: Throughout 2007, borrowers in trouble with lenders have called here, written for help and cried in conversations about their desperate straits. For a newspaper, it's become a gut reality check, a window into this tough time of reckoning.
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From Inman News:
Tamara Dawn, a real estate broker in Sacramento, Calif., compiled statistics for Sacramento County which show that REO sales and short sales -- which are sales of homes in which the sale price falls short of what the homeowner still owes on the mortgage -- accounted for about 26.3 percent of total sales in the county from May 7 through Nov. 7.

A short sale can assist a homeowner in avoiding foreclosure and can be less costly for a lender than taking ownership of the property. Short-sale transactions can take more effort and time than typical real estate transactions, as they typically require extensive paperwork and can take weeks to receive a decision back from the lender on whether to approve or reject the terms of the sale.

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 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.

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 the Sacramento Bee:In 24 years as president and chief executive officer of Sacramento's Safe Credit Union, Henry Wirz said he's never seen such "widespread credit problems in the Sacramento region."
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Q: You've been here since 1984 and seen all the cycles, up and down, good and bad. And this is the worst credit problem you've ever seen in Sacramento?

A: The reason I say that is this is touching not just the people who have traditionally always been a problem, which is people who have lower credit scores. In every crisis, when we first have a downturn, it's the people at the bottom of the economic pyramid who seem to experience the worst outcomes. I think what surprised us was in this downturn we're seeing people who had, at the outset, relatively good credit having negative outcomes.
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From the Sacramento Bee: A persistent housing slump that has relentlessly driven down home prices has now wiped out at least three years of home equity gains across much of the Sacramento region...For buyers, who have driven home sellers and much of the real estate industry mad by patiently remaining on the fence, it's fresh proof of a market getting ever more warm and friendly.

That's especially true in suburban neighborhoods with plenty of new construction. "I've got two sets of buyers looking at property in Lincoln, 2,943 square feet listed for $325,000," said Viki Benbow, a Coldwell Banker real estate agent. "It's like $106 or $107 a square foot. Those houses three years ago were selling in the mid-$500,000s."
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DataQuick estimated that 27.6 percent of the region's existing home sales in October involved foreclosure properties. It was 35.9 percent in Sacramento County.
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From Home Front:
Mostly, it was acres and acres of dead subdivisions that just jumped out at a driver touring this part of the state. In so many places the streets and sidewalks are in, the utility wires are sticking out of the ground, the street signs are up - and it's nothing but weeds almost as far as you can see.
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In Edgewater: A street of 20 houses built by Roseville's JMC Homes with only one house occupied. In Plumas Lake: a Ryland Homes subdivision called Thoroughbred Acres. Five lovely models and nothing else. Behind it a pile of Ryland flags and poles. I walked up to read the writing on the flags and a jackrabbit ran off. Down Arboga Road, another subdivision by Lakemont Homes. Even the models had dead lawns.

I don't mean to pick on Plumas Lake. But some of it looked like a poster child for the consequences of risky lending. In many neighborhoods there is an overpowering feeling of abandonment and at the very least, neglect. I cannot remember anywhere - not in Lincoln nor Merced - seeing so many unkempt and unmowed lawns.From the Sacramento Bee (hat tip Jeff):

From News10's Dana Howard:
Last September, I was driving through the newer neighborhoods in the northern section of Stockton, looking for people who were facing foreclosure. It was one of many stories about the rampant number of foreclosures in the Sacramento area.

My strategy was to knock on the doors of homes that had "For Sale" signs posted out front. Surely, I thought, many who would be selling their homes in what was then a climate of depreciating home values must be selling out of financial necessity, possibly to avoid foreclosure. We must have knocked on 50 doors. The overwhelming majority of the doors were unanswered. It wasn't because the owners weren't home, but because the owners would never be home. The houses were vacant.

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 Sacramento Bee: A few years ago, Placer and El Dorado counties were red hot, flush with Bay Area transplants and drawing more residents each year at a tremendous rate. Now that trend is cooling. Both counties grew at a slower pace in the past fiscal year than during any of the previous 35 years, according to population estimates released Wednesday by the California Department of Finance... Placer County hasn't seen a lower rate of population growth since 1971, according to state figures. And El Dorado's hasn't been this low since 1968.
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The driver for the change appeared to be a statewide drop in domestic migration – movement from one part of the country to another. Instead, all of California's growth this year came from natural increase – more births than deaths – and immigration from other countries.
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From KCRA: A new Centex Homes development in Rancho Cordova is in limbo because of a dreary housing market, the developer confirmed Thursday. The 13 homes currently under construction in the Cypress at Kavala Ranch development will be finished, but none of the other lots will be developed for now.From Bloomberg: When Quinn Cuthbertson looks around his new neighborhood in El Dorado Hills, California, he sees rows of empty homes and barren hillsides. A promised new school and a clubhouse haven't materialized. Cuthbertson paid $460,000 for a four-bedroom house in this northern California town named for the mythical golden city. He now suspects his neighbor spent $45,000 less. Nearby, 87 of 98 Toll Brothers Inc. home sites are undeveloped.
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"Half-filled developments are an advertisement for a failing housing market," said Retsinas, a former assistant secretary for housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. "It also has a spillover effect on the surrounding community."
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From the Sacramento Bee:Pressured by a faltering economy and often burdened by loans they took out during the housing boom, more Sacramento-area homeowners are looking to reverse mortgages for an escape route. But many are finding the road blocked by the falling values of their homes. "A lot of them aren't qualifying now. With the falling values they don't have as much equity," said Sylvia Williams, a Elk Grove loan specialist with San Rafael-based Sequoia Reverse Mortgage.From Home Front:[A] lawsuit [was] f[i]led in Sacramento County Superior Court by the Park River Oak Estates Homeowners Association in Sacramento against Chuck and Victoria Scott Yeager. The lawsuits alleges that the Yeagers owe the association $12,000 in overdue assessments and fees. Yeager was...the first pilot to break the sound barrier in 1947 at Edwards Air Force Base.

From the Stockton Record:The sales run for existing homes in San Joaquin County - mostly foreclosures [about 80%] - continued to pick up speed in April. But after a small median sales price jump in March, prices fell sharply in April, sliding below the $200,000 mark in Stockton [a drop of 43.0% YoY and hitting $240,000 in San Joaquin County, a decline of 36.8% YoY], according to figures from the latest Coldwell Banker Grupe-TrendGraphix monthly sales report, based on Multiple Listing Service data.
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Cameron Pannabecker, owner of Cal-Pro Mortgage Inc. in Stockton and a board director of the California Association of Mortgage Brokers, said he is urging caution about buying now as real estate agents and brokers tout the current market as a great time to buy.

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?

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 Sacramento Bee: It's only one month's data, and it came from a winter month that's considered unreliable for trend spotting. But February sales of new and existing homes in Sacramento County -- the largest sector of the region's real estate market -- were just 7.7 percent fewer than in February 2007.
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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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From the Sacramento Bee:
When DataQuick Information Systems reported this week that Sacramento County posted its first gain in year-over year home sales in 37 months, these were the neighborhoods that made it happen: working-class areas in south Sacramento, North Highlands and North Sacramento, Elverta and Citrus Heights...What they have in common is an abundance of homes with falling values, heavily discounted bank-owned residences and scenes of multiple bids by investors and first-time buyers.
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During the third quarter of 2007, Meadowview's 95832 was one of California's most default-prone ZIP codes....April sales jumped 266 percent over the same month in 2007. The ZIP code's median sales price was $185,000, down 44 percent in just a year...[DataQuick's Andrew] LePage said 79 percent of the April sales in that ZIP code were homes lost to foreclosure during the past year.
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From the Sacramento Bee:In Sacramento County, sales of new and existing homes totaled 1,961 in April, the highest since Sept. 2006, according to DataQuick. The April sales tally was 26.3 percent higher than April 2007 -- the first time that year-over-year sales in the county have posted a gain since March 2005, DataQuick reported.
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Prices have rapidly dropped with heavily discounted, bank-owned homes accounting for a majority of purchases in the eight-county capital region. That means the lower end of the housing market is fueling much of the surge. Median sales prices -- where half the homes sell for more and half for less -- are down to Feb. 2003 levels in Sacramento County. The county's median sales price in April fell to $232,000 -- down 32 percent from a year ago [the steepest decline yet] and 40 percent off its Aug. 2005, high of $387,000.Jim Wasserman has the breakdown by county here [xls].

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 Forbes: Worst U. S. Housing Markets

1. Sacramento, Calif.

Over-building and speculation helped the Sacramento housing market become one of the fastest gainers in the country during the housing boom. It's now in a near free-fall.From the Sacramento Bee: Think back now to mid-2004 when Sacramento County's median sales price for resale homes broke through the $300,000 barrier. It was a sensational moment. "Housing prices hit milestone," The Bee reported. The newspaper account said it took 13 years for prices to climb from $100,000 to $200,000 – and only two to "rocket" to $300,000.

From the Sacramento Bee:Sukhwinder "Suki" Kaur bought the wrong house at the wrong time. Within months of her July closing on the two-story home in Elk Grove, work in the new subdivision stopped and the builder's parent company, Dunmore Homes, filed for bankruptcy protection. Kaur, who is paying on a $430,000 mortgage, has become the target of two lawsuits and 28 liens from unpaid subcontractors and suppliers. More than a dozen other individuals in the Monterey Village development are in similar predicaments.
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At one end of Kaur's street are the visible signs of the owners' distress. Rows of utility lines are capped and waiting for homes across a sea of mossy dirt. Nearby, temporary poles mark one subdivision entrance where a gate was never installed. In the distance, a cluster of unfinished homes are sore reminders of the unfolding tragedy. Many of the 50 or so homes completed are vacant.
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From the Sacramento Bee: Sacramento County's median sales prices slipped to $280,000 during the month, down more than $100,000 and 27.6 percent off their August 2005 peaks. Those prices were the lowest since February 2004, DataQuick reported.
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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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A look at Sacramento real estate market numbers for November:

• Sacramento Real Estate Statistics Blog
• Sacramento Real Estate Blog
  

From the Sacramento Bee:The sheer drop in values the past two years – more than 25 percent for houses and a stunning 80 percent for raw land, according to one estimate – has put the region on national and international investors' radar screens...In the Sacramento suburbs, lots worth $100,000 apiece during the boom would fetch barely $20,000 today,...Jim Radler of Park Place Partners Inc., a Roseville land broker...said. In some parts of greater Sacramento and the Valley, lot prices have reverted to farmland values.

"We are a market that has gotten some notoriety for how quickly and badly we've been hit," said Pete Nixon, a senior vice president and land-sales specialist in the Roseville office of commercial broker CB Richard Ellis. "So this is a market that people are going to look at."
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