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Foreclosures hit new all-time high in Kern
| Friday, Sep 5 2008 12:20 PM
Last Updated: Friday, Sep 5 2008 4:31 PM
One thousand properties foreclosed in Kern County during August, county figures show, the most ever among records going back to 1995.
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Default notices also hit a new all-time high. Lenders recorded 1,326 last month, numbers from the Kern County Recorder’s office show, reversing slight declines in May, June and July.
Tony Ansolabehere, the county’s assistant assessor-recorder, estimates there are currently about 5,600 foreclosed properties still owned by lenders in the county. Most are homes, he said.
“There’s a lot of inventory out there that needs to be absorbed,” Ansolabehere said.
Bakersfield appraiser Gary Crabtree figures in the past 12 months, some 4,538 single-family homes have foreclosed in the metro area.
Crabtree estimates roughly one out of every 24 homes in metropolitan Bakersfield foreclosed during that time.
DETAILS
August’s 1,000 foreclosures were up 246 percent compared to a year earlier, when 289 were recorded. The monthly count grew by 75, from 925 in July.
For the year to date, 5,956 Kern properties foreclosed through August, county numbers show. For the last 12 months, the tally is 7,455.
Default notices, which are the first step in a possible foreclosure, increased more than 51 percent from August 2007, when lenders recorded 875. Last month’s filings had also crept up from July’s count of 1,227.
August’s record broke the previous monthly high set in April, when 1,303 defaults were recorded.
Some industry observers have previously suggested a decline in California’s defaults around July was temporary, due to complications from incorporating Countrywide Bank’s operations into Bank of America’s.
Loan volume declined to 1,819 filings, the eighth-lowest count of any month since January 1995, when county records began. A year earlier, more than 4,400 property loans were recorded; in July, more than 1,900.
The all-time high was August 2005, when the county recorded more than 9,500 loans.
PRICES DOWN
Early data indicates prices for existing homes took a hit in August, Crabtree said.
As of Friday afternoon, the median sales price for existing single-family homes in the metro area was running $178,750, he said, adding that not all sales had yet been reported to the multiple listing service. Information for new homes wasn’t available by press time.
August’s number is more than 33 percent below August 2007’s median of $270,000 for existing homes.
The monthly price also dropped from July’s median of $190,000.
He expects pace of sales to be roughly in the neighborhood of July’s, when more than 550 existing homes sold in the metro area.
Sales have picked up as prices have dropped. A year ago, in August 2007, existing-home sales totaled 276.
Distressed sales seem to be making up an increasingly large part of the market.
More than 73 percent of August’s transactions were repossessed properties sold by lenders or were so-called “short sales,” Crabtree said. In a short sale, lenders agree to sell a house for less than is owed on it in order to avoid the expensive foreclosure process.