California Foreclosure Sales Jump 80% in March

According to data from ForeclosureRadar.com and the Field Check Group, California, notices of trustee sales, which are preludes to foreclosure sales, climbed by more than 80% to 33,178 in March, from February. Mark Hanson, president of the Field Check Group, said the big jump was due to both the expiration of foreclosure moratoriums and a California law enacted late last year that temporarily delayed default and foreclosure notices.

On March 12, 2009, I wrote a post entitled New Law Extendeds California Home Foreclosures (again). This prior post talked about California's latest 90 day foreclosure moratorium law. These mis-guided laws will result on a wave of California foreclosures rather than the past trickle we would have seen. If nothing else, this will just extend the bottoming of the San Diego/California real estate market. 

The existing California foreclosure process has been tested and is a known, proven method of moving real estate property from non-payers into strong new purchasers. Currently with the California law enacted last year and the latest 90 day extension, the California foreclosure process now takes a minimum of 231 days.  To bring this back to the real world, the 231 days is from the start of the process. This California foreclosure does NOT start until the homeowner has been behind a number of months on their payments. So, with all the programs to try to work out some type of loan modification, many times the actual foreclosure process does not start for many months past the first missed payment.

The initiation of the foreclosure process is further delayed by Government backed (FHA/VA) loans and Government controlled (IndyMac) lenders. In California, it is now quite common for the time a homeowner can stay in their home without making any mortgage payment to exceed 12 months!

These facts are never mentioned in most TV/newspaper stories that run stories on the plight of the troubled homeowner who is being foreclosed. To top things off, just yesterday, a Los Angeles Acorn spokesperson was saying that they were considering non-violence protests to block the on-going foreclosure evictions.   San Diego real estate blog