U.S. Plan Will Help Homeowners Avoid Foreclosure

Homeowners across the United States who are undergoing financial hardship could avoid foreclosure under a plan announced on Nov. 30 by the U.S. Treasury Department. Under the plan, millions of at-risk homeowners could be free of mortgage debt without going through foreclosure, and given $1,500 for relocation.

The Treasury plan, which potentially applies to 75 percent of the mortgages in the U.S., including those backed by Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae (those two organizations are currently devising guidelines), provides incentives for lenders and homeowners for completing Short Sales – transactions in which the lender agrees to a sale price that’s less than the borrower owes on the mortgage. Short Sales are preferred to foreclosure because homeowners take less of a hit on their credit and lenders realize a smaller loss.

However, Short Sales often get bogged down because of the complicated nature of the transaction. Deals can fall through because they take too long.

The official effective date of the plan is April 5, 2010, but participating mortgage servicers can begin operating under the terms of the program before then if they are ready to meet all reporting requirements.

Under the plan, which speeds up and simplifies the Short Sale process, mortgage servicers have 10 days to approve or reject a request for a Short Sale. And when the sale is done, the borrower must be fully released from the debt.

OneWest Bank accused of pushing home loan borrowers into foreclosure

Nineteen months after the catastrophic failure of one of Sacramento’s top lenders, Pasadena-based IndyMac Bank, a flurry of local lawsuits alleges that the bank’s successor – OneWest Bank – is systematically working to push home loan borrowers into foreclosure.

The allegations filed in the Eastern District of U.S. Bankruptcy Court claim that OneWest can make more money by foreclosing than by keeping borrowers in their homes. That’s due to its so-called “shared-loss” agreement with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., at least 10 local lawsuits allege.

A video made in Fairfield and circulating widely on the Internet also alleges that OneWest stands to earn millions from taxpayers by foreclosing on borrowers as a result of its shared-loss agreement with the FDIC.

The FDIC declined to comment on the Sacramento lawsuits, but it recently denounced the video’s “blatantly false claims.” The agency told The Bee that its agreement with OneWest contains provisions to make sure the lender is taking adequate steps to modify loans.

OneWest declined to comment on either the lawsuits or the video.

The FDIC, which seized IndyMac in July 2008, sold the failed institution to Pasadena-based OneWest in March 2009.

As part of the deal, the FDIC agreed to absorb some losses from the troubled loan portfolio. That’s after OneWest absorbs the first $2.5 billion in losses, the FDIC said.

But Sacramento bankruptcy lawyer Peter Macaluso claims the shared-loss agreement will reward OneWest for foreclosing on homes. Here’s how, he said: The company bought IndyMac’s troubled portfolio at a 30 percent discount. It can count on the FDIC eventually reimbursing 80 percent or more of its losses – and also can keep proceeds from the foreclosure sales.

“They’re deliberately blowing people out in a systematic pattern,” said Macaluso.

He has filed eight lawsuits in U.S. Bankruptcy Court on behalf of area IndyMac borrowers who have filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection.

Macaluso alleges that OneWest improperly boosted his clients’ monthly loan payments – sometimes by more than $1,000 – by doing a new escrow analysis after they had filed for bankruptcy protection. He said his clients can’t afford the increases and are in danger of losing their homes.

On Friday, he said OneWest has since rescinded the extra payments in three cases.

Elk Grove bankruptcy attorney Mark Wolff makes similar allegations in two lawsuits in U.S. Bankruptcy Court.

“We made the allegations that it’s a systematic approach they’ve employed, and it’s a violation of bankruptcy code,” said Wolff. He said he previously filed similar actions against Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase. His clients also are still in their homes.

A third attorney, Sean Gjerde of Elk Grove, recently filed a civil suit against OneWest in Sacramento Superior Court. It alleges violations of the Truth In Lending Act, claiming that OneWest is unresponsive to attempts to modify an Elk Grove client’s IndyMac mortgage.

“As soon as OneWest took over, the communication stopped,” Gjerde said. “My client has been in default for a long time and it’s been like heck to even get them to talk to me.”

The local lawsuits represent another messy aftermath of IndyMac’s implosion in July 2008, a development that added to fears of an imminent U.S. financial collapse.

IndyMac was a leading Sacramento lender, ranking 10th in loan volume during the riskiest part of the housing market: mid-2005 to mid-2007. Statistics from researcher MDA DataQuick show IndyMac made 5,312 home loans worth $1.4 billion during this period in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado, Yolo, Sutter and Yuba counties.

A Treasury Department performance report last week showed that OneWest has temporarily or permanently modified 25 percent of its loans that are 60 days or more late. Twelve lenders reported higher modification rates and nine reported worse rates. The report said OneWest had permanently modified 3,087 of its 112,000 delinquent loans by the end of January.

Home Front: Foreclosures’ collateral damage widespread

If you’re among the thousands of Sacramento-area homeowners who played it conservative during the housing boom, who didn’t refinance or flip to a bigger house, everyone else’s foreclosures reached out and smacked you anyway.

Sales prices are lower. There’s less home equity to tap into. Local services have been shredded by falling property tax revenue.

Such repo collateral damage is why so many owners who pay their mortgages on time are so grouchy.

Rob Wassmer hasn’t been affected so much. Fourteen years ago he bought an east Sacramento house – in the Fab 40s – cheaply at the very bottom of the last housing bust. His older neighborhood has largely escaped the brunt of 52,000 foreclosures across the Sacramento region since 2007.

But Wassmer knows the financial whipping people have taken in Lincoln, Elk Grove, North Highlands and Yuba City. Being an academic, he knew there had to be a number for the carnage.

“I knew this kind of research had been done. I wanted to do a study of Sacramento,” said Wassmer, chairman of California State University, Sacramento’s department of public policy and administration.

Wassmer analyzed $9 billion in sales prices from 36,822 home sales in Sacramento, Yolo, Yuba, Sutter, Placer and El Dorado counties between January 2008 and June 2009. Almost half were homes sold by banks. The other half were sold by regular folks.

He concluded that the foreclosed homes cost this one region of America $2.7 billion in price cuts and lost equity over just 18 months.

• The repos sold for $659 million less simply because they were bank-owned and differed from normal sales. They took $1 billion more in price cuts because they were near other repos.

• Both reductions then stripped $1 billion from sale prices of nearby homes never in foreclosure danger.

Collectively, these foreclosures cost local governments $27.1 million in property taxes. Reassessments will likely take more.

Said Wassmer, “This is a call for regulation.” He suggests a federal law to make lenders and borrowers meet in “structured mediation” at least once before foreclosure.

Few ideas have proved so far to be the solution. See the research directly at: >www.csus.edu/indiv/w/wassmerr/ResForeclosure.pdf

State tax credit confusion

Tax preparation season is already disappointing some 2009 California home buyers who aren’t getting a full three-year, $10,000 tax credit for buying a new home.

A Lincoln buyer called Home Front saying his 2009 credit will be about $300 – well short of the $3,333 he’d expected to get for each of the next three years.

Spokeswoman Brenda Voet of the California Franchise Tax Board told Home Front that the size of the credit depends on the buyer’s specific tax situation. “It’s a dollar for dollar credit for taxes owed,” she said.

That means if you owe $300 in state taxes you get a credit for the $300 and don’t owe it. If you owe $4,000 in state taxes you get a credit for $3,333 and pay $667.

No one gets money from the state above what they owe, Voet said.

Housing has hope amidst the hurt

Foreclosures inched up slightly across the capital region in the last three months of 2009, but loan defaults fell for a third straight quarter as lenders focused more on finding alternatives to taking the keys, La Jolla-based MDA DataQuick reported Wednesday.

The newest statistics revealed a still-painfully fragile housing market beset by widespread distress but also beginning to emerge from the subprime meltdown.

“We’re moving from a lender-created mess to an economy-created mess,” said Stuart Feldstein, president of lending industry tracker SMR Research in New Jersey. “The nature of the beast has changed. That doesn’t mean it’s better, but it’s more curable.”

• DataQuick counted 5,081 fourth quarter 2009 foreclosures in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. The third-quarter count was 5,004 foreclosures.

• Fourth-quarter capital-area defaults numbered 7,522. That was down from 9,751 in the third quarter. Regionally, foreclosures peaked at 7,769 in the third quarter of 2008. Area defaults crested at 11,049 the first quarter of 2009.

The trend was repeated on a larger scale statewide. The sustained decline in defaults led DataQuick to suggest the worst may be over in hard-hit entry-level markets that dominate inland areas of California. Feldstein concurred, saying, “The good news, often overlooked, is (that) the truly horrible risks of people who shouldn’t have gotten loans in the first place are running off at a fairly rapid rate.”

But DataQuick analysts also noted that the recession is spreading the mortgage crisis to more expensive neighborhoods. Owners there, many with prime fixed-rate loans, are struggling with wage cuts, state employee furloughs and a 12.4 percent unemployment rate that may keep rising.

Wednesday, DataQuick reported that most of the loans experiencing trouble at the end of 2009 were originated in early 2007. Many also date back to mid-2006, “the worst of the ‘loans gone wild’ period,” the company said.

Lenders with the highest numbers of problem loans statewide included Countrywide (now an affiliate of Bank of America), Wells Fargo and Washington Mutual (now an affiliate of JPMorgan Chase). Along with Bank of America and World Savings, all were the most active lenders in the second half of 2006, DataQuick said.

Today, many of those lenders have become slower to proceed with foreclosures.

“Our take is that lenders are increasingly willing to work with borrowers before a notice of default is filed,” DataQuick Analyst Andrew LePage said.

Other options include loan modifications or the short sales that are becoming more common, according to the Sacramento Association of Realtors. Short sales – in which lenders accept sale prices below what they’re owed – accounted for one in four December sales in Sacramento County and West Sacramento, said SAR.

Elk Grove-based Century 21 real estate agent Derek Kirk said more than half the for-sale signs in the suburban city are tied to short-sale listings.

“I believe lenders are getting pressure to make it easier,” he said. “They are doing more of them, and I think some of the banks are now trying to streamline and implement better procedures so they can make quicker decisions.

“Waiting 90 to 120 days is not realistic for buyers.”

The Foreclosure Story

It is everyone’s dream in Sacramento to own a home. As home loans are made easily affordable, almost every family has a home of their own. Home loans with low mortgage rates are provided by the government for low income and people with bad credit. These loans have interest rates as less as three percent. Consolidation of loans by the government has made repayment much easier. In spite of all these, foreclosures are on the rise.
The major factors that contribute to foreclosures are fall in real estate prices, abundance of unsold homes, inert home sales and mortgage loans going into default. People could not afford homes because of their heavy prices and were seen buying homes at fancy prices. This was possible because of the government grants and loans with adjustable rates. A major fall back with government grants was that, they were issued to people with low income and bad credit. With loans having adjustable rates, people were finally left hands full with a mortgage loan they could not repay. When owners do not repay, the foreclosure process sets in. Homes are foreclosed when owners are lagging in their repayment for a period of 5 months.
But this can be stopped. Owners can stop their homes from being foreclosed. Since foreclosure is a time consuming process, owners will have to act immediately. First understand the foreclosure process. In a hurry, your first visit is to a foreclosure rescue firm. But wait, stay far away from them. Most of these firms are scams and they charge thousands of dollars from you to only have a look at your file. They do not offer any help. They only make you believe that you cannot stop the foreclosure. But they are wrong.
Foreclosures can be stopped by none other than the home owner. That is you! You can escape a foreclosure by getting your payments to the current. Selling your home and paying off for what was yours or refinancing are other options. While selling a home, you must repay all the loans. But in foreclosures, second mortgages and credit lines are usually written off.
Another option to stop foreclosure is to file bankruptcy. Filing of bankruptcy can help stop foreclosure. But this is only a temporary option. Also this is a very complicated and expensive procedure. There are huge risks of the bankruptcy judge dismissing your case. If that happens, the foreclosure procedure will continue as before and you are left with no option.
In order to avoid all this and save yourself the foreclosure, do not delay repayment of your loan. Make use of all the facilities and programs the government has to offer in paying back your loans.
Choose a loan and repayment scheme that best suits your finances and avoid foreclosures.
For additional resources and information please visit the following sites.

Resource Links:
http://www.gmacrealestate.com
Bill Fields All Star Coaching Program: http://www.AllStarCoaching.net
GreatWest GMAC Search all MLS Listings: http://www.LocalHomeLink.com
GreatWest GMAC Consumer Buyer/Seller Blog: http://www.GreatWestBlog.com
T. Sami Siddiqui (Broker/ Owner) Buzz About Sacramento Blog: http://www.samisiddiquiblog.com
Brodie Stephens (Executive Vice President) One Stop Blog: http://www.brodiestephensblog.com
GreatWest Podcasts- Weekly Updates on new REO, Short Sale, Bank Owned Foreclosure Listings: http://www.HouseTalkOnline.com
GreatWest Videos: http://www.youtube.com/brodiestephens
Facebook Brodie Stephens Profile Page: http://www.facebook.com/brodiestephens
Facebook GreatWest Profile Page: http://www.facebook.com/searchmlshomesforsale
MySpace Brodie Stephens Blog: http://www.myspace.com/brodiestephens
MySpace GreatWest Blog: http://www.myspace.com/greatwest
Picasa Web Album: http://picasaweb.google.com/brodiestephens
GreatWest Real Estate Careers- GMAC is looking for Professional Realtors to Join Us: http://www.CareersWithUs.com
Global Employee Relocation: http://www.employeerelocation.blogspot.com
Apply for a Loan: http://www.choice1funding.com
ActiveRain Blog Brodie http://activerain.com/blogs/brodiestephens
ActiveRain Blog Company http://activerain.com/blogs/greatwestgmac
Sacbee http://www.sacbee.com
Company WordPress Site http://www.thehomeholders.com
Real Living http://www.realliving.com

Foreclosure flood fails to materialize in Sacramento area

People who watch housing prices have predicted for months that another deluge of foreclosed homes would soon hit the market – once again crushing Sacramento-area property values.

But the flood of bank repos hasn’t materialized. And now, a leading California foreclosure analyst says it probably won’t.

“From the things I’m seeing, there’s not going to be a wave any time soon,” said Sean O’Toole, president of ForeclosureRadar, a Contra Costa County firm that tracks mortgage defaults and foreclosures.

Despite a growing number of loan defaults and delinquencies, O’Toole said banks are now selling more homes than they’re repossessing – and political pressure on them to work with homeowners is slowing foreclosure rates. Other market watchers also see banks slowly dribbling out their supply of repossessed homes.

“From all appearances, it does look like they’re managing it better,” said Charlene Singley, president of the Sacramento Association of Realtors.

If the supply of homes for sale remains in balance with demand, the danger of another sharp downturn in prices is lessened, at least in the short run, O’Toole and others said Thursday.

The prospect of another wave of new foreclosures has long threatened to destabilize a capital-area market precariously balanced by massive repo sell-offs, curtailment of new-home production and buyers enticed by lower prices, low interest rates and tax credits.

Even as disaster scenarios remain easy to imagine, the number of area for-sale signs is now at an encouraging 52-month low.

Still, the downside to this relative steadiness in the near term, O’Toole acknowledged, may be that it will take longer to work through the mortgage crisis and recover.

On Thursday, La Jolla researcher MDA DataQuick offered fresh evidence of the market’s tenuous balance.

Regional home sales in September ticked up slightly from August, with 3,454 new and existing homes changing hands in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. Yet September marked a fourth straight month in which sales fell below the same time last year.

That’s because recent sales have been unable to match last year’s sharp rise as banks unloaded thousands of repos, a phenomenon that also put downward pressure on area home values. O’Toole said banks have cut their statewide repo inventory by 41 percent in the past year.

Now that the repo sales pace has slowed in Sacramento County – from 70 percent of sales in February to 53 percent in September – median sales prices have quickly stabilized.

DataQuick reported a September median price of $176,000 in Sacramento County. Median is that point where half the homes cost more and half less. That was down from a 2009 high of $180,000 in August, but still well above February’s housing bust low of $160,000.

Fewer repo listings this year brought another phenomenon not seen since the boom: bidding wars. The phenomenon so frustrated state employee Lauri Lathrop that she finally bought a new house in Elk Grove in September.

“I was putting in offers $15,000 above the asking price, and I was getting outbid,” she said Thursday. “I saw this new house and nobody could outbid me. It was like it was mine,” she said.

Lathrop obtained a favorable interest rate and an $8,000 federal tax credit for first-time buyers – though she missed the window for a $10,000 state tax credit for buyers of new homes.

Such perks combined with affordability to prod more buyers off the fence this year. Sales of new and existing homes combined from January through September this year total 30,231, beating 29,751 during the same period in 2008 and 26,777 from January through September 2007.

As a result, the number of for-sale signs in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties has fallen to May 2005 lows, according to Sacramento researcher TrendGraphix.

The affiliate of Lyon Real Estate counted 6,129 listings in the four counties at the end of September. The numbers have fallen for 25 straight months since peaking at 16,262 in August 2007.

TrendGraphix said 13.4 percent of current listings are bank repos and 27 percent are short sales, in which owners hope lenders will accept a sales price below what they owe. That means 40 percent are so-called “distress sales.”

That’s scary, but real estate agents like Singley and Carey Covey of Cook Real Estate maintain there is an ample supply of buyers. And sales statistics from the Sacramento Association of Realtors show that banks are faster to approve short sales now than months ago.

As the repo share of the sales mix has continued to decline, short sales rose to almost 20 percent of sales in September in Sacramento County and the city of West Sacramento, SAR reported.

Covey, who specializes in selling bank-owned homes, said he believes the supply of repos will remain steady. But he expects no trouble selling them at such a pace.

“As of right now, we’re still short on supply, and there’s still a lot of demand,” he said.

Economist expects California existing-home sales to fall in 2010

Sales of existing homes will fall slightly next year in California as people lose more jobs and cheap foreclosed homes become a smaller part of the market, California Association of Realtors economists predicted Wednesday.

Fewer sales of foreclosed homes may also push median prices a little higher than this year, the group said.

Watch, too, for growing trouble in the higher-end home market, which so far has been spared the huge price drops seen at the less expensive end, said CAR chief economist Leslie Appleton-Young.

The California trade group for 172,000 real estate agents is predicting sales of 527,500 homes in 2010 – 2.3 percent less than in this year. It also foresees a 2010 median price of $280,000. That’s 3.3 percent higher than this year’s current estimate of $271,000.

But anything could happen in a still-volatile and sluggish economic and housing climate, CAR said. The group, releasing the estimates during a trade show in San Jose on Wednesday, cautioned that numerous wild cards could hurt the real estate market in 2010, including the state budget crisis, rising unemployment and possibly rising interest rates.

“As we get through this, there are a lot of unknowns,” said Appleton-Young.

In California, the nation’s largest struggling housing market, those wild cards include:

• The supply of foreclosed homes. Appleton-Young said prices could be pressed downward again if a heavier-than-expected wave of foreclosures floods the market next year. Foreclosures accounted for slightly more than half the state’s sales this year; the estimate for next year is one-third.

“I don’t see a tsunami of foreclosures,” said the CAR economist. “I see an elevated level of foreclosures over the next couple of years, and an acceleration of foreclosures at the upper end of the market.”

Analysts, including Irvine-based John Burns Real Estate Consulting, note that banks have been slow to foreclose and list existing repos, setting up the potential for a new wave of bank-owned properties going up for sale.

Burns contends that continued government intervention – including tax credits for buyers – is necessary to stimulate housing demand in a slow economy. CAR is among the real estate groups lobbying Congress to extend a first-time homebuyer tax credit that expires Nov. 30.

Sacramento-area real estate agents are also getting “calls to action” to lobby congressional reps for an extended tax credit, said Charlene Singley, president of the Sacramento Association of Realtors.

• Sales of higher-end homes. Appleton-Young said many buyers are having trouble financing more expensive houses – and hesitating over fears they will lose value. Those factors, combined with rising joblessness among owners of higher-priced homes, have the potential to bring down prices in the upper segment.

• Loan resets: Projections suggest that thousands of new risky adjustable-rate loans – including especially dangerous pay-option mortgages – will reset in 2010 across California, possibly triggering a new stream of loan defaults. Many of those, too, involve owners of more expensive homes.

July 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. home prices had the smallest annual drop in 10 months, signaling the free fall of property values is abating in the three-year housing slump at the center of a global recession.

Prices declined 5.6 percent in May from a year earlier and rose 0.9 from April, the Federal Housing Finance Agency in Washington said today. Economists expected a 0.2 percent drop for the month, according to the median of 16 estimates in a Bloomberg survey.

“We saw a rebound of home prices in some parts of the country in part because the share of distressed sales dipped,” said Thomas Lawler, a former Fannie Mae economist who’s an independent consultant in Leesburg, Virginia. “That’s not any solace to anyone losing his shirt.”

Five U.S. regions showed price increases in May from April, the FHFA said. Job losses and record foreclosures have deterred buyers and slashed U.S. home prices 33 percent since the July 2006 peak, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index. The highest unemployment since 1983 and the biggest foreclosure rate on record thwarted government efforts to revive real estate demand.

The area that includes California had the biggest one-month gain from April, at 2.7 percent. The South Atlantic region that includes Florida saw a 1.4 percent increase in May. Prices in New England fell 2 percent and in the region that includes New York and New Jersey dropped 0.1 percent.

Regional Prices

Every region of the U.S. saw price declines in May from a year earlier, the FHFA said. California dropped the most, at 14 percent. The South Atlantic slid 6.6 percent and the New York and New Jersey region was down 4.3 percent.

“The distress in the housing market was not caused by unemployment, but now we are seeing a wave of delinquencies and foreclosures by people who, if they had kept their jobs, would be unlikely to default,” Lawler said.

The unemployment rate rose to 9.5 percent in June, the highest since 1983, bringing the total number of lost jobs to about 6.5 million since the recession started in December 2007, the Labor Department said. Home prices in 20 major U.S. metropolitan areas dropped 18.1 percent in April from a year earlier, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index.

Federal Efforts

The Federal Reserve is trying to keep rates low and spark a housing recovery by purchasing as much as $1.25 trillion in mortgage-backed securities to free up funding for home loans.

Home-loan rates fell to a record low twice in April, helped by the Fed’s program. Rates started climbing in May along with Treasury yields on investor concern that a greater supply of debt being sold to fund government spending will fuel inflation. In June the average 30-year rate reached a 2009 high of 5.59 percent, according to Freddie Mac.

Last week the rate was 5.14 percent, down from 5.2 percent a week earlier, according to the McLean, Virginia-based mortgage buyer.

President Barack Obama has pledged to spend $275 billion to help keep as many as 9 million Americans in their homes. The government is offering incentives to servicers, the companies that administer loans, to modify terms for delinquent borrowers or refinance mortgages that exceed the value of homes.

Late Payments

Those efforts may not be able to keep up with the number of Americans falling behind on loan payments. The U.S. delinquency rate rose to a seasonally adjusted 9.12 percent in the first quarter and the share of loans entering foreclosure rose to 1.37 percent, the Mortgage Bankers Association said in a May 28 report. Both figures were the highest in records going back to 1972.

One in every eight Americans is now late on a home-loan payment or already in foreclosure, according to Jay Brinkmann, chief economist for the Washington-based bankers’ group.

U.S. foreclosure filings — notices of default, auction or bank seizure — rose to a record in 2009’s first half, according to RealtyTrac Inc., an Irvine, California-based seller of real estate data. More than 1.5 million properties, one in every 84 U.S. households, received a foreclosure filing, RealtyTrac said in a July 16 report. That was a 15 percent increase from a year earlier.

The FHFA index tracks price changes for properties financed with mortgages owned or securitized by government-controlled Fannie Mae, the largest U.S. mortgage buyer, and Freddie Mac, which is No. 2. It excludes foreclosed properties bought with cash or financed with so-called FHA loans guaranteed by the Federal Housing Administration.

To contact the reporter on this story: Kathleen M. Howley in Boston at kmhowley@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: July 22, 2009 10:57 EDT

Real Estate Sales

Posted: Friday, Jul 24, 2009 – 05:11:08 pm PDT

http://www.cdapress.com/articles/2009/07/24/real_estate/1-real-estate-sales.txt

Email this story Printer friendly version By Press staff and
The Associated Press
Jeff Chiu/Associated Press In this July 21 photo, a home for sale is shown in San Francisco. A real estate group’s report said Thursday, July 23, sales of previously occupied homes rose 3.6 percent from May to June, the third consecutive monthly increase and a sign that a housing recovery is under way in much of the country.
COEUR d’ALENE – Homebuyers across the Western U.S., many convinced home prices are close to the bottom, helped fuel a 15 percent annual increase in the region’s home sales in June, according to two reports released Thursday.

And while it’s not likely to mean another huge surge in out-of-state buyers flush with excess cash to drive North Idaho prices higher, it could mean another trickle of transplants.

“We are getting back to the way it was eight years ago, before the boom,” said Michael Threadgill at Keller Williams Realty in Coeur d’Alene. That means a mix of people coming into the area, and others leaving.

Fire-sale prices on foreclosures and other distressed properties lured many buyers, particularly in California, Nevada and Phoenix. Those sales also dragged down the median home sales price in the 13-state region. It tumbled nearly 25 percent from June of last year to $214,800, the National Association of Realtors said.

That was the biggest median price decline in any region and helped pull the national median down about 15 percent from year-ago levels to $181,800. Nationally, sales rose 4 percent, without adjusting for seasonal factors. But more importantly, sales posted their third monthly increase, indicating the housing market has turned the corner and is recovering.

Leonard Baron, a real estate professor at San Diego State University, said for homes in the lower end of the market at least, where many properties are getting multiple bids, “we’ve hit a floor.” But the same is not true of homes above the median price.

“For higher-dollar properties, it’s harder to tell,” Baron said. Threadgill said Kootenai County is similar, with good activity on homes less than $200,000.

“There is a healthy amount of demand,” he said.

The turnaround in the West, has also been geographically uneven. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego and Boise were the only major metros in the West to register an increase in home sales last month, according to The Associated Press-Re/Max Monthly Housing Report, released Thursday.

“Interest rates are very favorable, so I’ve had a lot of people looking and getting off the fence,” said Laura Zajdman, a ZipRealty agent in Los Angeles.

Elsewhere in the West, home sales fell last month in Anchorage, Alaska, Denver, Albuquerque, N.M., Billings, Mont., Honolulu, Portland, Ore., and Seattle, according to the report, which tallies all home sales in the metropolitan statistical area by all real estate agents, regardless of company affiliation.

The demand for bargain-priced properties has created a traffic jam of buyers for lenders trying to unload homes. Often, banks are fielding multiple offers for a single property and buyers are finding themselves forced to put in bids higher than asking price – a market dynamic not seen since the heady days of the housing boom.

“There’s an extreme amount of multiple offers on those (bank-owned) properties,” said Mike West, broker-owner of Century 21 MoneyWorld in Las Vegas. “A decent property, within days on the market, could literally have 10 to 20 offers.”

“That happens here, too,” Threadgill said, and in some cases is driving prices up. A bank selling a home worth about $200,000 may offer it at $150,000, but multiple offers can drive bidding to $180,000 – still a short-sale price for the buyer, but netting the bank more of its investment.

“The worst may be over,” Threadgill said. “It is going to take a while to sort through all the repercussions.”

Capital-area foreclosures keep climbing in second quarter

By Jim Wasserman
jwasserman@sacbee.com

http://www.sacbee.com/business/story/2047112.html

The capital-area foreclosure crisis raged on in April, May and June, with lenders repossessing another 4,448 homes and filing notices of default against 10,682 more households late on their payments.

The newest statistics from La Jolla-based researcher MDA DataQuick brought the foreclosure total to 41,903 households since the start of 2007 in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties.

That’s 10.2 percent of California’s 410,744 foreclosures in the same time period. Statewide, 45,677 households surrendered keys to banks during the second quarter – and 124,562 received notices of default, DataQuick reported. Those are the formal foreclosure warnings issued when homeowners fall three months or more behind on payments.

As the state’s foreclosure crisis has grown and caused the economy to wobble and unemployment to rise to 11.6 percent statewide and the same in the capital region, the percentage of borrowers able to find their way out of trouble has steadily declined, DataQuick has reported.

The foreclosure tally rose both statewide and in the eight-county capital region from the first quarter, while the number of loan defaults fell slightly.

Regional highlights:

• Amador County: 29 foreclosures and 85 defaults.

• El Dorado County: 202 foreclosures and 632 defaults.

• Nevada County: 98 foreclosures and 286 defaults.

• Placer County: 515 foreclosures and 1,570 notices of default.

• Sacramento County: 3,019 foreclosures and 6,862 defaults.

• Sutter County: 154 foreclosures and 355 notices of default.

• Yolo County: 216 foreclosures, 541 defaults.

• Yuba County: 215 foreclosures and 351 defaults.

DataQuick predicted foreclosure numbers will go higher in the third quarter as lenders boost hiring to deal with a large backlog of delinquencies.

The firm said half the loans that defaulted during the quarter were made before July 2006, and half afterward. The lenders that originated the most troubled loans were Washington Mutual, a failed thrift taken over late last year by JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Countrywide, the failed lender taken over by Bank of America in mid-2008.