Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Folsom’

Tyler Smith & Team ranked #24 in the Nation

Wednesday, April 14th, 2010

  For the months of January and February we were ranked in the top 50 nationwide. We came in at #24 and are very excited. We have one of the hardest working teams out in the market place!!! Thank you to all of our Buyers, Sellers, and Asset Managers who trusted us!! We are here to serve!!!

Foreclosures’ collateral damage widespread

Friday, February 12th, 2010

If you’re among the thousands of Sacramento-area homeowners who played it conservative during the housing boom, who didn’t refinance or flip to a bigger house, everyone else’s foreclosures reached out and smacked you anyway.

Sales prices are lower. There’s less home equity to tap into. Local services have been shredded by falling property tax revenue.

Such repo collateral damage is why so many owners who pay their mortgages on time are so grouchy.

Rob Wassmer hasn’t been affected so much. Fourteen years ago he bought an east Sacramento house – in the Fab 40s – cheaply at the very bottom of the last housing bust. His older neighborhood has largely escaped the brunt of 52,000 foreclosures across the Sacramento region since 2007.

But Wassmer knows the financial whipping people have taken in Lincoln, Elk Grove, North Highlands and Yuba City. Being an academic, he knew there had to be a number for the carnage.

“I knew this kind of research had been done. I wanted to do a study of Sacramento,” said Wassmer, chairman of California State University, Sacramento’s department of public policy and administration.

Wassmer analyzed $9 billion in sales prices from 36,822 home sales in Sacramento, Yolo, Yuba, Sutter, Placer and El Dorado counties between January 2008 and June 2009. Almost half were homes sold by banks. The other half were sold by regular folks.

He concluded that the foreclosed homes cost this one region of America $2.7 billion in price cuts and lost equity over just 18 months.

• The repos sold for $659 million less simply because they were bank-owned and differed from normal sales. They took $1 billion more in price cuts because they were near other repos.

• Both reductions then stripped $1 billion from sale prices of nearby homes never in foreclosure danger.

Collectively, these foreclosures cost local governments $27.1 million in property taxes. Reassessments will likely take more.

Said Wassmer, “This is a call for regulation.” He suggests a federal law to make lenders and borrowers meet in “structured mediation” at least once before foreclosure.

Few ideas have proved so far to be the solution. See the research directly at: >www.csus.edu/indiv/w/wassmerr/ResForeclosure.pdf

Slow recovery ahead: buck stops in the pocket

Wednesday, September 16th, 2009

Star-spangled camper ... a homeless man in a temporary tent city in Sacramento, California

Star-spangled camper … a homeless man in a temporary tent city in Sacramento, California Photo: Getty

The continuing fear of job losses in the US means consumers are saving rather than spending – denying fuel to the retail engine of the economy.

EVEN in the affluent US capital, a city that has been relatively insulated from the worst recession since Great Depression, the beggars are visible. They sleep on the street just a block from the White House and at major intersections they wait for fellow Americans to come to a standstill and spare a dollar.

Many carry signs telling their personal story: laid off, returned Iraq vet, lost the house and the job, got sick and no health care.

A year after the US financial markets went into a tailspin, its economy is showing tentative signs of a weak recovery but unemployment continues to rise, though not at the terrifying rate of six months ago, when 600,000 people a month were joining the jobless lines.

Something else has happened in America as well. The era of easy credit that fuelled two decades of mostly spectacular growth is over, not just on Wall Street. The American consumer has started saving. Mortgages, personal loans and even credit cards are harder to get. Consumer credit was down 5.2 per cent annualised between April and June. Revolving credit, which includes credit cards, was down 9 per cent.

The turbocharged consumer market that powered the American economy since the 1980s has run out of puff. These combined, related factors – people don’t spend if they fear for their jobs – are likely to define the US recovery. It will be slow and painful.

The jobless rate rose to 9.7 per cent in August and is expected to peak above 10 per cent in the months ahead. It is already there in at least 15 states and some economists predict it could be five years before the US economy generates enough jobs to overcome those lost and to employ the new workers entering the labour force.

This fear of job losses is likely to keep consumers’ wallets in their pockets. Without a return to spending – retail sales make up 70 per cent of the US economy – it seems inevitable the recovery will be slower than in the past.

So what are the positives? Retail sales have shown signs of improvement and the federal stimulus package is working its way into the economy.

The retail figures for August were up 2.7 per cent, the biggest jump since January 2006, and vehicle sales up 11.9 per cent.

Excluding vehicles, retail sales were up 1.1 per cent – the comparable figure in July was a 0.6 per cent decrease – but the boost was due in part to higher petrol prices at convenience stores. Most analysts are cautious about popping the champagne corks too early and will wait for a stronger spending trend to emerge.

In the housing market – which helped spark the crisis – there are tentative signs of stabilisation. Home foreclosures dipped slightly in August from July but are still 18 per cent above a year ago. The highest foreclosure rate is in Nevada, with one house in 62.

On home prices, the Case-Shiller Index has shown increases for May and June after 37 months of decline. The number of home sales has risen too.

”The only doubts about it are the market is rather abnormal now with all these foreclosure sales,” said Robert Shiller, who helped develop the index.

Falls in house prices have been huge – in some markets as much as 50 per cent. Many Americans, perhaps a quarter of those with mortgages, owe more than their homes are worth.

The Obama Administration’s ability to stimulate the economy further is severely curtailed by its huge budget deficits – and Congress has run out of patience with financial bail-outs.

“I don’t think we are out of the woods yet,” President Barack Obama said this week. “We need to be careful about taking the crutches away from the patient too early.”

When the housing crash ends, how will Sacramento grow?

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Some day this housing crash will end. Judging from history, Sacramento’s ranks of developers will snap right back into growth mode – building a fresh wave of new homes.

The big question: Will this new wave of growth create a more urban, compact Sacramento, as many community activists and politicians hope? Or will it follow the time-tested pattern of past booms in the late 1970s, the second half of the 1980s and the first half of this decade, pushing ever-larger homes farther into farmland?

Perhaps it’s easiest to expect more of the same. Suburban development has for decades been Sacramento’s main growth industry, aside from state government.

During this decade’s housing boom, builders constructed 156,000 homes, condos and apartments in the Sacramento region – largely on empty land in suburban cities. Much of this last wave of housing on former farmland has proved especially vulnerable to shredded values and foreclosures – a fate far less common in established neighborhoods closer to jobs.

Still, signs of change were starting to emerge even before the housing market fell apart. Loft-style housing projects were popping up all over Sacramento’s central city. And construction had begun on two 53-story condominium towers on Capitol Mall.

So might visions of mid- and high-rise living in downtown Sacramento take off where they left off – just as it seemed the city was reaching a new level?

Looking ahead, analysts believe the next wave of residential growth in the Sacramento region – perhaps still several years off – might be different. It’s likely to roll in with expensive gasoline, higher home energy costs and lenders’ continued insistence on tight credit.

State and federal policies governing the flow of public money increasingly favor more compact, transit-friendly types of development. And as baby boomers age, they are expected to move down to smaller housing units.

All these forces could mean more people in the next wave of growth will live in smaller homes, and more may live downtown. But no one should underestimate the ethos of the Central Valley: People here like yards and space.

July Home Sales

Monday, August 24th, 2009

6B22HOMESALES_C

Investors buy 25-acre Folsom project out of foreclosure

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

A real estate investment firm said Monday it has acquired a 25-acre residential development in Folsom through foreclosure proceedings and plans to develop the property with new homes.

PCCP LLC, which has an office in Sacramento, will resume construction at the Folsom Treehouse master-planned community, located at Prairie City and Iron Point roads, in a partnership with Signature Properties. The company acquired the project last week. The property had been in possession of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and United Commercial Bank, after the original loan of $22.5 million went into default last year. PCCP acquired a discounted note from the FDIC and United Commercial in March.

The development is made up of 291 finished lots, with 99 single-family lots, 164 condominium lots and 28 constructed or partially constructed homes.

The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Company vice president Jim Galovan said PCCP, which focuses on recapitalizing distressed real estate, has targeted Folsom for investment in the past due to its strong job base anchored by the 7,000-employee Intel campus. The area currently has a low inventory of new homes, he said.

Sidney B. Dunmore still looking for the next big chance

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Home Front caught up this morning with Sidney B. Dunmore, former head of failed Granite Bay-based Dunmore Homes,regarding a story going around in the building industry.

 As the first local builder to go under as the housing bust gathered steam here in Sacramento, it was probably inevitable that Dunmore would be among the first rumored to be engaged in some kind of comeback.

Not so, Dunmore, 54, said in a phone conversation. Not yet. He has no new limited liability corporation to sniff around for land to start over.

“I’m always looking. I’m always looking at opportunities,” said Dunmore. “I can’t really say I’ve found anything at this time. But I’m still in the hunt if some opportunity pops up. But there’s nothing on the horizon.”

Dunmore Homes filed for bankruptcy in Nov. 2007 and was liquidated in Feb. 2008 – after more than a half century in business and construction of 22,000 homes. Dunmore described the current building industry economy in the capital region as “pretty flat.” But at least it’s finally stopped getting worse, he said.

Home Front: Competition frustrates first-time buyers….

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

Laurel Bane, 28, is a working professional with a down payment in hand. Hunting for her first home in Natomas, she’s made six offers since March. And she’s lost every house.

“It’s been a bidding-war hell,” Bane said. “I increased my offer by $12,000 on one, and I still lost out. I was $13,000 over asking price on another and still didn’t get it.”

Welcome to the punishment being inflicted this summer on first-time buyers. Considered saviors of the region’s real estate economy, thousands like Bane are trudging through minefields where their homebuying dreams are repeatedly blown up.

That’s because at the lower end of the price scale there are far more potential buyers than homes for sale.

Horror stories increasingly abound across a Sacramento housing market dominated by repos and short sales.

Home Front is hearing from buyers who expected it to be easy but are being outbid by investors. When they do offer more than investors, the bank often takes the lower bid because it’s cash.

Others say offers are made without getting any response.

The only way to compete is to bid well above the listing price. But when appraisals come in below the offer, the deal is killed.

The alternative is short sales, in which banks take less than owed to avoid the higher costs of foreclosures, but they can take months to complete.

Another snag: Home sales increasingly involve “flippers,” said Smith, referring to investors who buy properties that they try to quickly resell for a profit.

But if the so-called flipper hasn’t held the home for at least 90 days, the first-time buyer can’t get a Federal Housing Administration loan, which requires only 3.5 percent down.

“Minefield? That’s an understatement,” said Smith.

For Bane, who’s looking for a house below $200,000, it’s not been easy.

“I’m just looking for a small, manageable house for myself and one roommate. Yet everything I find is sold within the day,” said Bane, a facilities business coordinator at Rancho Cordova-based Vision Service Plan. “We’ll write an offer and submit it, and then find it was already sold.”

Bane had expected she’d be moved into her first home by now. With the federal Nov. 30 deadline for an $8,000 first-time buyer tax credit approaching, she’s fretting.

What’s roughing up buyers like Bane is a shortage of bank repos – and an unwillingness of most private homeowners to sell at today’s prices. For reasons that aren’t fully understood, banks have held thousands of repos off the market. The result is bidding wars, especially for homes listed below $200,000.

With defaults and foreclosures back on the rise regionally, I believes a “substantial” new supply of repos may hit the market next month.

“I am hoping that’s true because right now, I’m telling you, it’s tough on buyers.”

In Rocklin, would-be buyer Karin DeFoe said she’s just had her fourth offer fall apart. DeFoe, house hunting for her college-age son, said, “We haven’t had any luck.”

Last month, she told Home Front she’s lost offers on three houses to cash investors. All made lower bids than hers.

“All the repos are priced real low to start bidding wars,” she complained.

To Bane, it’s just plain frustrating.

“We’ll go into houses and people are there before us, and people are there after us,” she said. “Every house we look at has lines of buyers.”

Sacramento-Area Prosecutors Focus on Mortgage Fraud …

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

About two years ago, El Dorado County District Attorney Vern Pierson hired a forensic auditor and increased training for his prosecutors in the area of real estate fraud and other financial crimes.

He dedicated two prosecutors and two investigators to handle a majority of the fraud cases.

As a result, more financial schemes that in the past might have been dismissed as belonging in civil court are instead being prosecuted as criminal offenses, El Dorado prosecutors and investigators said.

Pierson said his office has made mortgage fraud crime cases a priority. “The magnitude of the loss is so great on the individual victim and also on our economy as a whole,” he said.

Prosecutors in the Sacramento area have taken varying approaches to the surge in real estate fraud. Some, such as El Dorado County, have devoted more resources, while others have used existing anti-fraud units.

Nationwide, the number of suspected cases of mortgage loan fraud has increased from 52,868 in 2007 to 64,816 in 2008, the FBI says.

Former U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott said that about 2 1/2 years ago his office started receiving reports of mortgage fraud on an increasingly regular basis.

“It was just a recurrent theme I was hearing over and over again,” said Scott, now a partner with Orrick, Herrington and Sutcliffe.

Scott pushed for a mortgage fraud task force that included the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI and the state’s real estate board.

As the cases poured in, Scott said his office and the task force realized that “we need to find allies in the region.” The task force started to offer training to law enforcement agencies and local district attorney’s offices in the investigation and prosecution of mortgage fraud cases.

“We realized we were ground zero here for mortgage fraud in this district,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew Stegman.

The U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of California, which handles cases from the Oregon border to Bakersfield, had the most mortgage fraud indictments in the nation during fiscal year 2008, Stegman said.

Training provided by the federal government and organizations such as the California District Attorneys Association is helping smaller district attorney’s offices to handle the increasing workload as a result of the mortgage meltdown, said Bob Cosley, supervising investigator with the El Dorado County District Attorney’s Office.

Larger agencies such as the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office usually have an established unit that handles real estate fraud and other types of white-collar crimes

Folsom’s Most Walkable Neighborhoods

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

NATOMA STATION, FOLSOM

Residents of this suburban neighborhood on Folsom’s west side find it easy to get out in nature. There are plenty of sidewalks, ponds teeming with birds and wildlife, and easy access to the American River Bike Trail, which winds for miles through some of the region’s most beautiful terrain. Built about 20 years ago on the hill behind the Folsom Premium Outlets, it’s a model of the well-planned community. There’s an elementary school and several parks; a light rail station enables residents who work downtown to avoid clogged Highway 50 at rush hour. On nice days, the neighborhood is filled with kids on skateboards, teens WWT (Walking While Texting) and people strolling with their dogs. A group called the Folsom Dam Runners meets Saturdays and Sundays for runs around nearby Lake Natoma.
• Real estate: One- and two-story single-family homes sell from the low $400,000s to the high $500,000s.
• Hip hangout: Folsom Premium Outlets
• Good to know: The developer commissioned original art for the parks and main entrances to the neighborhood.