WEBCAST: California foreclosure sales accelerate

DISCOVERY BAY
March 15, 2007 11:04am

Home foreclosures in the United States being reported by the media likely understate actual foreclosure sales activity, according to Foreclosure Radar, a Discovery Bay-based foreclosure listings and software company.

According to the company, February saw 4,171 foreclosures with a total loan value of $1.64 billion for distressed properties sold at auction in California. This dollar volume surpassed the prior record reached in the third quarter of 1996, and represents a 48 percent increase from December 2006, says the company which tracks actual foreclosure sales, not just initial listings.

“The foreclosure sale numbers, sometimes referred to as REO's reported by similar listing services do not reflect current foreclosure sales activity. Instead, they are based on a document called a Trustee's Deed that gets recorded with the county weeks after the sale. With the rapid changes in the foreclosure market, the delay in waiting for these documents to be recorded has resulted in actual foreclosure sales to be under reported by more than 300 percent,” he says.

(Mr. O’Toole amplifies on the growing problem in today’s CVBT Audio Interview. Please click on the link below to listen or download the audio file to your iPod or PC.)

“We’ve been tracking home, commercial, and bank foreclosures for years and the recent rise is alarming,” says Mr. O’Toole. “If you look at the data for Contra Costa County, for example, the number of foreclosures has increased by 865 percent in just one year and this is by no means the worst example in California.”

Such figures help explain the sudden surge in subprime lender failures, with nearly two dozen shuttered, Mr. O’Toole says.