Gohabsgo_IHB
New member
Edit: I posted the same post twice...not sure how to delete it...oops
Foreclosure and distressed property topics
- Thread starter graphrix_IHB
- Start date
NEW -> Contingent Buyer Assistance Program
LOL. Likewise on your daytrading thread...
Indeed!
So what’s happening in Irvine?
That’s funny, it does look bad over there.
Can’t really tell but I think there maybe couple on Lido Island
These are supposed to fall last. In fact, I'm surprised there's even a NOD in Crystal Cove.
I'll have to get access to Foreclosure radar once it's time to buy.
The people that I know that bought here have zero mortgage.
Thanks for the info. I did not know Crystal Cove has condo/semi-detached. That would explains the default. I've thought they are around $4 Million price tag. The person that I know is trying to sell her house but having problem selling, however, she has no pressure to sell because she has zero mortgage.
They make an impression on us that they have deep pockets, many of them are over-stretched. IMO, with the economy going to a prolong and deep recession, they will fall hard.
yeah but the economy also affects us too.
halfnote19_IHB
New member
P = Preforeclosure (Notice of Default)
A = Auction (Notice of Trustee Sale)
B = Bank Owned (REO)
A = Auction (Notice of Trustee Sale)
B = Bank Owned (REO)
jbenko_IHB
New member
Man...these type of threads are the ones I don't bother giving my 2 cents because they aren't even worth 2 cents. I'm pretty clueless when it comes to more than half of the things you guys talk about, but I sure learn a lot.
Just saying thanks...keep it up!
Just saying thanks...keep it up!
IrvineRealtor_IHB
New member
blackvault_cm said:
LOL. Likewise on your daytrading thread...
IrvineRealtor_IHB
New member
Per Roo's request...
Newport Beach:
and Newport Coast:
Newport Beach:
and Newport Coast:
tenmagnet_IHB
New member
Pelican Hill looks to be immune
tenmagnet_IHB
New member
skek said:
Indeed!
So what’s happening in Irvine?
freedomCM_IHB
New member
are they foreclosing on Hoag hospital? look at all that action at the end of Newport blvd!
Is that all those ocean view condos? there really isn't much new construction there. I wonder if it is all HELOC abuse?
Is that all those ocean view condos? there really isn't much new construction there. I wonder if it is all HELOC abuse?
tenmagnet_IHB
New member
freedomCM said:
That’s funny, it does look bad over there.
Can’t really tell but I think there maybe couple on Lido Island
IrvineRenter_IHB
New member
Twice bitten: One town's foreclosure nightmare
One town's second go around with a foreclosure crisis finds it more prepared. Here's how Lancaster, Calif., where nearly every city block is affected, is coping with the current mess.
By Melinda Fulmer, MSN Real Estate
Twice bitten: One town's foreclosure nightmare // Image courtesy of Dan Marion
Real-estate agent Dan Marion thought he had ridden out his hometown's last great foreclosure crisis more than 15 years ago. That was the early 1990s, when aerospace jobs were fleeing in Lancaster, Calif., and the local economy was crumbling.
Now, just over 15 years later, the high desert town known for its cheap and spacious real estate is reeling again, with the second-highest foreclosure rate this year of any ZIP code in the United States.
Lancaster had 3,543 total filings between January and August 2008, the most recent data available from RealtyTrac. That is second only to Stockton, Calif. And if you include Lancaster's immediate neighbor to the west, third-ranked Palmdale, it has the highest concentration of foreclosure activity in one small area. (RealtyTrac is an MSN Real Estate partner.)
"(The foreclosures) started coming fast and furious towards the middle of 2007," says Marion, of Troth Realtors GMAC Real Estate. Now, with foreclosures up 71% year-over-year in the U.S., almost every block in Lancaster has at least two vacant bank-owned properties with a for-sale shingle out front.
A town in crisis
This time around, it wasn't a dwindling economy that brought crisis to this dusty town next to Edwards Air Force Base. It was a volatile combination of subprime lending, ignorance and greed.
Builders put up homes they shouldn't have in this commuter town an hour outside Los Angeles, says economist Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Then they relied on subprime loans to get lower-income buyers to stretch to afford them.
"Now we have a larger number of homes that are not likely to find owners," Leamer says.
Locals also point to the large number of naïve, new house-rich homeowners who began using their home as a cash register, taking out lines of credit to buy RVs, three-wheel bikes and other expensive toys, before watching rates and gas prices tick up. "The attitude was 'I want it now,' " says Elizabeth Brubaker, director of the city's housing and neighborhood revitalization agency. "People got greedy."
Of the 4,063 homes listed as active on the Greater Antelope Valley's Multiple Listing Service in late October, 74% are owned by banks or are short sales.
And unlike other parts of the country, this crisis has touched just about every part of this town, from cracker-box starter homes to custom estates in gated communities.
On almost every street in Lancaster, you can find houses with brown lawns, lockboxes and tumbleweeds rolling in the backyard.
In front of one house in a nice middle-class community on the coveted west end of town, a forlorn-looking burgundy recliner sits next to the curb, abandoned hastily during a move-out. In this newer neighborhood of stucco homes that are 3,000 square feet and larger, foreclosures or short sales account for almost half the houses on some streets.
It's quite an enticement for teenagers looking for a place to hang out and drink or do drugs, Marion says. And it's also a draw for vandals looking to steal hardware, appliances or even the outside air conditioning unit. "I've had houses where everything was taken from the inside right down to the flooring," Marion says.
The empty house next door
Kimberly Dunn moved to this neighborhood with her husband and six kids a year ago from another part of Lancaster, believing that she was scooping up the last of the bargains in this clean, low-crime area. "It was a ghost town at first," she says. But some people moved in and she expected it to get better. "It was like a block party. We thought we got a great deal."
The $380,000 they paid seemed like a bargain for the two-story, five-bedroom house. However, since that time, she's seen more houses empty out, including the house next door. And the bids on that one — with the exact same floor plan — are coming in at about $250,000. "That’s just devastating to me," she says. "We should have waited."
Farther east, in O Bel Sole Estates, a new eco-friendly neighborhood, about two dozen homes sit empty, unable to sell in the face of so many foreclosures. Signs in front of the development tout killer amenities such as solar panels — a big selling point in the desert — but so far it doesn't look like there are any takers.
There are no cars parked in any of the driveways. And on a Friday, the sales office has a "Closed" sign in the window.
"I bet someone could get a real bargain here," Marion says. That is, if they can stomach being the only one in a community with half-finished streets that look out over empty fields.
Down the road, in the older Piute neighborhood, the foreclosure problem is at its worst. This neighborhood — the first rung on the homeownership ladder — has many homes that are boarded up.
And this, Brubaker says, is in many cases an improvement, because at least it keeps the vandals and squatters out. "We try not to board up houses unless a window is broken," she says.
After dealing with years of blight after the last real-estate crisis, the city has better learned to clean up its problems. A much larger code-enforcement staff patrols neighborhoods, getting banks and homeowners to take care of their front landscaping and pick up trash, or risk citations and ultimately prosecution.
A fix for the city's woes?
Brubaker's agency also is trying to mitigate the foreclosure problem by buying up foreclosure properties in the hardest-hit areas and renovating them to sell to buyers. "We want to stabilize these neighborhoods," Brubaker says.
The city has purchased 72 homes so far, using redevelopment agency funds from property taxes. It also has earmarked another $6.9 million in community development block grant funds for the project.
Now, it's in the process of renovating the homes, adding high-efficiency HVAC units, patios to cool the back of the house, as well as drought-tolerant landscaping and completely new paint, floors and cabinets in most properties.
It's an expensive proposition, with renovations often costing as much as it cost the city to buy the home.
A crew is working on one city-owned house in Piute as we drive up, installing native plants next to the new driveway of the freshly painted yellow house. Inside, the compact 1960s four-bedroom house has been practically gutted and replaced, because of the poor shape of the house before.
"The walls in here had been painted black, and there was dog poop and cigarette butts on the floor," Brubaker says. The house was purchased from the bank for $80,000 and another $80,000 is going in for improvements. Brubaker says the city hopes to sell it for $160,000.
To bring up the value of the neighborhood and justify these prices, the agency also has begun planting trees and will put in new parkways and baseball fields around some of these affordable neighborhoods.
Still, analysts say, a price tag of $160,000 will be a hard sell in some of these older areas. "I would think that's a big gamble," Leamer says.
Brubaker doesn't think so, but she says her agency is willing to negotiate and maybe even take a slight loss on some of the properties to get them sold and get the area back on its feet.
With such a large stream of foreclosure properties still coming into the market, Lancaster won't achieve firm footing this year, or maybe even the next.
"I think it will be a long time before (a lot of buyers) reach out there again," Leamer says. "The city has to shrink back to where it was," before the start of the boom.
But agents say sales are starting to pick up — about 1,800 of the 4,000 homes on the market are now in escrow — as investors and some buyers move in to scoop up deals.
It's not clear how many of these purchases will be held as rentals, and how many will be occupied by owners. But it's a start, says Marion, who is confident that this California town will recover faster than it did the last time around. "The economy is not as bad as it was in the early 1990s," Marion says.
And the banks are now discounting properties, Brubaker notes, letting the healing begin.
"There's a real shortage of affordable housing" in Southern California, Marion says. He believes buyers and builders will eventually return to this commuter suburb, just as they did the last time. "Everybody will forget. They always do."
One town's second go around with a foreclosure crisis finds it more prepared. Here's how Lancaster, Calif., where nearly every city block is affected, is coping with the current mess.
By Melinda Fulmer, MSN Real Estate
Twice bitten: One town's foreclosure nightmare // Image courtesy of Dan Marion
Real-estate agent Dan Marion thought he had ridden out his hometown's last great foreclosure crisis more than 15 years ago. That was the early 1990s, when aerospace jobs were fleeing in Lancaster, Calif., and the local economy was crumbling.
Now, just over 15 years later, the high desert town known for its cheap and spacious real estate is reeling again, with the second-highest foreclosure rate this year of any ZIP code in the United States.
Lancaster had 3,543 total filings between January and August 2008, the most recent data available from RealtyTrac. That is second only to Stockton, Calif. And if you include Lancaster's immediate neighbor to the west, third-ranked Palmdale, it has the highest concentration of foreclosure activity in one small area. (RealtyTrac is an MSN Real Estate partner.)
"(The foreclosures) started coming fast and furious towards the middle of 2007," says Marion, of Troth Realtors GMAC Real Estate. Now, with foreclosures up 71% year-over-year in the U.S., almost every block in Lancaster has at least two vacant bank-owned properties with a for-sale shingle out front.
A town in crisis
This time around, it wasn't a dwindling economy that brought crisis to this dusty town next to Edwards Air Force Base. It was a volatile combination of subprime lending, ignorance and greed.
Builders put up homes they shouldn't have in this commuter town an hour outside Los Angeles, says economist Edward Leamer, director of the UCLA Anderson Forecast. Then they relied on subprime loans to get lower-income buyers to stretch to afford them.
"Now we have a larger number of homes that are not likely to find owners," Leamer says.
Locals also point to the large number of naïve, new house-rich homeowners who began using their home as a cash register, taking out lines of credit to buy RVs, three-wheel bikes and other expensive toys, before watching rates and gas prices tick up. "The attitude was 'I want it now,' " says Elizabeth Brubaker, director of the city's housing and neighborhood revitalization agency. "People got greedy."
Of the 4,063 homes listed as active on the Greater Antelope Valley's Multiple Listing Service in late October, 74% are owned by banks or are short sales.
And unlike other parts of the country, this crisis has touched just about every part of this town, from cracker-box starter homes to custom estates in gated communities.
On almost every street in Lancaster, you can find houses with brown lawns, lockboxes and tumbleweeds rolling in the backyard.
In front of one house in a nice middle-class community on the coveted west end of town, a forlorn-looking burgundy recliner sits next to the curb, abandoned hastily during a move-out. In this newer neighborhood of stucco homes that are 3,000 square feet and larger, foreclosures or short sales account for almost half the houses on some streets.
It's quite an enticement for teenagers looking for a place to hang out and drink or do drugs, Marion says. And it's also a draw for vandals looking to steal hardware, appliances or even the outside air conditioning unit. "I've had houses where everything was taken from the inside right down to the flooring," Marion says.
The empty house next door
Kimberly Dunn moved to this neighborhood with her husband and six kids a year ago from another part of Lancaster, believing that she was scooping up the last of the bargains in this clean, low-crime area. "It was a ghost town at first," she says. But some people moved in and she expected it to get better. "It was like a block party. We thought we got a great deal."
The $380,000 they paid seemed like a bargain for the two-story, five-bedroom house. However, since that time, she's seen more houses empty out, including the house next door. And the bids on that one — with the exact same floor plan — are coming in at about $250,000. "That’s just devastating to me," she says. "We should have waited."
Farther east, in O Bel Sole Estates, a new eco-friendly neighborhood, about two dozen homes sit empty, unable to sell in the face of so many foreclosures. Signs in front of the development tout killer amenities such as solar panels — a big selling point in the desert — but so far it doesn't look like there are any takers.
There are no cars parked in any of the driveways. And on a Friday, the sales office has a "Closed" sign in the window.
"I bet someone could get a real bargain here," Marion says. That is, if they can stomach being the only one in a community with half-finished streets that look out over empty fields.
Down the road, in the older Piute neighborhood, the foreclosure problem is at its worst. This neighborhood — the first rung on the homeownership ladder — has many homes that are boarded up.
And this, Brubaker says, is in many cases an improvement, because at least it keeps the vandals and squatters out. "We try not to board up houses unless a window is broken," she says.
After dealing with years of blight after the last real-estate crisis, the city has better learned to clean up its problems. A much larger code-enforcement staff patrols neighborhoods, getting banks and homeowners to take care of their front landscaping and pick up trash, or risk citations and ultimately prosecution.
A fix for the city's woes?
Brubaker's agency also is trying to mitigate the foreclosure problem by buying up foreclosure properties in the hardest-hit areas and renovating them to sell to buyers. "We want to stabilize these neighborhoods," Brubaker says.
The city has purchased 72 homes so far, using redevelopment agency funds from property taxes. It also has earmarked another $6.9 million in community development block grant funds for the project.
Now, it's in the process of renovating the homes, adding high-efficiency HVAC units, patios to cool the back of the house, as well as drought-tolerant landscaping and completely new paint, floors and cabinets in most properties.
It's an expensive proposition, with renovations often costing as much as it cost the city to buy the home.
A crew is working on one city-owned house in Piute as we drive up, installing native plants next to the new driveway of the freshly painted yellow house. Inside, the compact 1960s four-bedroom house has been practically gutted and replaced, because of the poor shape of the house before.
"The walls in here had been painted black, and there was dog poop and cigarette butts on the floor," Brubaker says. The house was purchased from the bank for $80,000 and another $80,000 is going in for improvements. Brubaker says the city hopes to sell it for $160,000.
To bring up the value of the neighborhood and justify these prices, the agency also has begun planting trees and will put in new parkways and baseball fields around some of these affordable neighborhoods.
Still, analysts say, a price tag of $160,000 will be a hard sell in some of these older areas. "I would think that's a big gamble," Leamer says.
Brubaker doesn't think so, but she says her agency is willing to negotiate and maybe even take a slight loss on some of the properties to get them sold and get the area back on its feet.
With such a large stream of foreclosure properties still coming into the market, Lancaster won't achieve firm footing this year, or maybe even the next.
"I think it will be a long time before (a lot of buyers) reach out there again," Leamer says. "The city has to shrink back to where it was," before the start of the boom.
But agents say sales are starting to pick up — about 1,800 of the 4,000 homes on the market are now in escrow — as investors and some buyers move in to scoop up deals.
It's not clear how many of these purchases will be held as rentals, and how many will be occupied by owners. But it's a start, says Marion, who is confident that this California town will recover faster than it did the last time around. "The economy is not as bad as it was in the early 1990s," Marion says.
And the banks are now discounting properties, Brubaker notes, letting the healing begin.
"There's a real shortage of affordable housing" in Southern California, Marion says. He believes buyers and builders will eventually return to this commuter suburb, just as they did the last time. "Everybody will forget. They always do."
Gohabsgo_IHB
New member
skek said:
These are supposed to fall last. In fact, I'm surprised there's even a NOD in Crystal Cove.
I'll have to get access to Foreclosure radar once it's time to buy.
WestparkRenter_IHB
New member
Roo said:
The people that I know that bought here have zero mortgage.
WestparkRenter_IHB
New member
skek said:
Thanks for the info. I did not know Crystal Cove has condo/semi-detached. That would explains the default. I've thought they are around $4 Million price tag. The person that I know is trying to sell her house but having problem selling, however, she has no pressure to sell because she has zero mortgage.
ocrebel_IHB
New member
skek said:
They make an impression on us that they have deep pockets, many of them are over-stretched. IMO, with the economy going to a prolong and deep recession, they will fall hard.
WestparkRenter_IHB
New member
ocrebel said:
yeah but the economy also affects us too.