Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 8:30 PM
Wash Rinse Repeat
From sddt.com
The city of San Diego is starting a new initiative to help communities dealing with home foreclosures, San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders announced this week.
Sanders accepted recommendations from the city’s Committee on Foreclosures and Neighborhood Stabilization. These included expanding the city’s vacant properties program to include foreclosed and vacant properties, and making it easier to keep track of who is responsible for the abandoned homes.
The recommendations also called for expanding neighborhood watch programs and creating a new city Web site to provide information and counseling to people losing their homes.
“Far too many San Diego families have watched the dream of home ownership become a nightmare of financial turmoil,” Sanders said at a press conference Tuesday. “My goal in creating the committee was to find ways to prevent and slow the rate of home foreclosures and defaults in our city.”
San Diego County has seen a 133 percent increase in foreclosed homes over the past year, according to the mayor’s office.
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Plus this from the Sacramento Bee:
California 2008
237,131 foreclosures
136,785 loan modifications
http://www.sacbee.com/realestatenews/story/1685519.html
“While lenders made interest rate cuts their primary tool, they also temporarily suspended monthly payments and turned toward “short sales” in the second half of 2008. Those are sales in which lenders take less than owed to avoid the higher costs of foreclosing.”
“The data show continued reluctance to offer deeds in lieu of foreclosure, in which a bank simply agrees to take the home back from the borrower. Lenders also avoided lowering the amount borrowers owe. By December, so-called principal reduction was less than 1 percent of workout solutions.”
Posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 at 8:30 PM in Local Government | 10 Comments » | 
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Oddly enough, I have made a good living in the housing industry. I am a small-time investor, who started out with a tiny apartment and progressed to owning multi-unit rental buildings and buying and remodeling homes. The only way the “Government” has ever been involved was collecting a lot of taxes and making evicting deadbeat tenants almost impossible. At this point the State of California needs to spend taxpayer money to fast-track the legal process of getting people out of homes that they don’t “own” and are in default on notes. Get the properties foreclosed, sold to new owners/investors, and the market will return to a normal condition. If an individual can’t pay a loan that they contracted for, tough s–t. If a bank/investor in bank/bond holder hold notes that are defaulting, tough s–t! The contract provides a “solution” for this situation. Get the process going, let the parties to the bad investment choice suffer the consequences, and leave the rest of society out of the game.
Will Pierson | March 11th, 2009 at 8:55 pmJim,
Just curious, do you see neg-am/opt-arm mortgaged home owners opting to:
A.) List their homes now before the loan recasts because they fear housing prices are only going to get worse.
B.) Hang in there to weather the storm, but still pay their mortgage.
C.) Look for a free rent ride when the mortgage recasts until they get evicted.
D.) All of the above.
With unemployment in California at 10%, this must be really killing the available owner-occupied buyers and foreclosure workouts if they don’t even have a job…
What are you seeing in the field?
Blue Streak | March 11th, 2009 at 9:35 pmWill, I agree with you. I think if they let the free market correct itself, the faster we can move through this. I for one have been waiting out the storm, looking to buy a home. I’ll just sit on the sidelines until things slow down. I even thought of just buying a few condos to rent out and get started a little backwards. The gov’t is just trying to please the majority and band-aid the situtation. The hold on foreclosures is just B.S. We are still about 50% higher in some areas than 1999 pricing, so things have a way to go, in my opinion.
With unemployment hitting hard, things are going to get a lot worse this year, fast.
Blue Streak | March 11th, 2009 at 9:40 pmJim,
BTW, I’m in RB, and wouldn’t you know it, an ice cream truck came through our neighborhood about 5:00 p.m.
I couldn’t believe it, so you now need to include RB, 92127, in your listing of ice cream truck zip codes.
This one was really bad too. It looked like it just crossed the border, over the desert, and had hand written “SLOW” caution signs on it.
Maybe it’s a sign of things to come…
Blue Streak | March 11th, 2009 at 9:49 pmNew MLS Category for ice cream truck – Frequency of visit and comments regarding the paint job and musical tonal/warble quality.
3clicks from da Beach | March 12th, 2009 at 12:18 amBlue,
I think people are waffling between all three of your choices, depending on the day – so I’ll pick d) All of the above, all at the same time!
We were talking about one yesterday that was a good example. Someone who had paid $1M-plus, financed almost all of it, and now can’t short-sell it for $700,000. The payments were figured to be around $7,000 per month, and it looked like there had been no payments for at least 14 months.
$7,000 x 14 = $98,000 savings.
It’s a house that’s officially on the market for sale, but how hard are they trying to sell it?
More and more people will be figuring this out, and if the powers-that-be continue to support non-foreclosure, are you surprised people are opting for the easy way out? I’m not, the government is coddling those that need tough love.
Jim the Realtor | March 12th, 2009 at 4:59 amAll this evil is good…
“The Republic is not what it once was. There is no interest in the common good. There is no civility, only politics.”
“The dark side of the Force is a pathway to many abilities, some considered to be unnatural.”
shadash | March 12th, 2009 at 6:37 amshadash,
Next Obama will be asking for “emergency powers” just like Chavez…
Blue Streak | March 12th, 2009 at 2:34 pmAgreed, but he won’t ask directly it will be more like…
“If you don’t grant me emergency powers over government the world will end. You don’t want the world to end do you? And while you’re voting make sure you pass TARP #13 because if you don’t people will be out of work. You don’t want people out of work do you?”
shadash | March 12th, 2009 at 2:50 pmAt least Obama is taking some sort of action. Putting money on the street will stimulate things. Case in point–I have a lease out for signature with for a medical office that we own–this tenant just received a grand from the Federal Govt. to open a new location–without the money–we would still have a vacant unit –it set vacant for six mos. and is in a prime location.
Withheld | March 13th, 2009 at 11:27 am