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: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: [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: 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: 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: Sacramento County, where median sales prices of new and existing homes combined are now 18.3 percent below this time last year, is still California's hardest-hit urban county for declining values.
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Sacramento County's median sales price for existing homes fell to $285,000 from $295,000 the previous month. That's down 24 percent from the August 2005 peak of $374,000 and lowest since $275,000 in April 2004.

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 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:"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 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 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: [EDD labor market consultant David] Lyons said it was disturbing that the region has added just 6,600 jobs in the past year, a growth rate of just 0.7 percent. "We haven't been below 1 percent since 1993," he said. Unemployment has risen 1 percentage point in Sacramento in the past year. With housing still suffering and state government likely to slow down its hiring in the face of an estimated $14 billion budget deficit, the short-term outlook for Sacramento is spotty at best.From the Sacramento Business Journal: Year-over-year, construction fell by 7,200 jobs in the region, a 10.1 percent decline, while financial jobs declined by 3,100, off 4.7 percent. Those declines were steeper here than in the state as a whole.

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: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 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 Chicago Daily Herald: Kimball Hill Inc. today warned it might become the latest Chicago-area victim of the national housing crisis. The Rolling Meadows-based homebuilder said in a filing today it has "substantial doubts about whether we will be able to continue as a going concern."

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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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 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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Monterey Village Getting Shredded - photos & video at the Sacramento Real Statistics blog

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 Stockton Record: Home-sales auctions have popped in the Central Valley since last summer, but the latest twist is an online auction for new homes with a bidding process similar to that used by eBay.
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Some residents there aren't happy about the impending auction. Richard Provencio lives at the north end of Crescent Park Circle, a lane that has 14 of the 18 houses to be auctioned off - the remaining four are model homes a block south. "I feel very robbed," he said. "These are the same houses I paid $620,000 for, and now they could be selling for $300,000 to $400,000."...Recently, he counted 15 houses for sale down the long street from his house, and many sit empty because of foreclosure. "Our ghost town," he said. "It's just sad, man."

Many of the homes in the development were bought initially by investors and then filled with renters, he said...The auction likely will draw only more investors, who then will put renters into the houses, he said.
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From the Wall Street Journal (hat tip Calculated Risk):If you own a home in a former bubble region like California or southern Florida, there's bad news… and really bad news. And they suggest that it is still way too early to go bargain hunting in these markets, although -- of course -- there is always the occasional deal around.

The bad news is fresh market data published Monday night by real-estate Web site Zillow.com. They show prices, as expected, kept slumping through the end of last year.

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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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: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 Lodi News-Sentinel:The housing boom was good for Ben Juarez, like so many other Lodi residents. It meant steady work and extra cash from overtime jobs, installing air conditioners and gutters at tract homes across the region.
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Now, with the housing bust, life is full of worry for Juarez — who's been jobless since November — and for thousands like him in the area. The EDD estimates that Lodi's jobless rate reached 7.3 percent in December, the latest figures available. That's up from 5.5 percent in December 2006 and 5.6 percent in December 2005....It adds to up to more than 1,000 extra residents without work compared to the past couple years. Because of the epic housing meltdown, many of those unemployed are local carpenters, plumbers, landscapers, real estate and finance workers.