A July report showed sales of 3,495 existing homes in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties, according to San Diego-based researcher MDA DataQuick.

Buyers also closed escrow on 320 new homes to push July’s regional sales tally to 3,815, up slightly from 3,758 in June.

The rise failed by a long shot to match the U.S. sales increase from June to July. The National Association of Realtors called it the fastest monthly gain since 1999 and a sign that the market “has decisively turned for the better.”

In the capital region, however, where the housing market is struggling to regain its footing, this year’s July sales were lower than the 4,126 sales reported in July 2008. By comparison, there were 2,906 area sales in July 2007 and 3,275 in July 2006. In July 2005: 6,159.

July marked the second straight month in which sales dipped below the same time a year ago. Last year a massive supply of bank repos fueled a sales boom by first-time buyers and investors. The boom has faded as repos fell to 58.7 percent of July sales, the lowest share in 15 months, DataQuick reported.

A dwindling supply of cheap repos drove Sacramento County’s median price higher – to $180,000 – in July, DataQuick reported. That’s after two months at $175,000, and well up from February’s low of $160,000 in a county that’s home to about six in 10 of the area’s home sales.

DataQuick said 38 percent of Sacramento County sales were below $150,000. Homes priced at $400,000 and higher were 6.6 percent of July sales.

Significantly, the rate of year-over-year price declines slowed in Sacramento County. July prices were 14.3 percent below July 2008. For much of the past two years Sacramento County’s median price – where half of homes sell for more and half for less – slipped 30 percent or more from the same month a year earlier.

“We’re coming off that period when we had the steepest slides,” said DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage. “It’s going to get easier and easier to get to single-digit decline from a year ago unless we see foreclosures and job losses ratchet up.”

Foreclosures in the region, indeed, rose in the second quarter of 2009. The unemployment rate in the region has climbed to 11.8 percent and to a record 11.9 percent in California, the state reported.

July’s median sales prices in Sacramento County are back to what they were in September 2001. Then, the county’s median household income was $44,928, according to Claritas, a demographic research company. Today, it’s $57,847, suggesting a market again well matched with incomes and even overcorrecting after its housing boom excesses.

Prices are back to October 2002 levels in Placer and Sutter counties and mid-2003 in El Dorado, Yolo and Yuba counties.

“It’s affordable by all our natural price measures,” said Dean Wehrli, a Sacramento executive with San Diego-based Sullivan Group Real Estate Advisors. “I would say we’re in the middle of the overcorrection.”

Wehrli said today’s median price for existing homes in Sacramento County is about the same as if the boom had not occurred and prices rose 3.4 percent a year since 2000.

But it’s still not easy to buy, complain first-timers trying to snag bargains.

“I’ve been in this since March. I’ve been outbid. I’m bidding $30,000 over the asking price. And still, cash just walked in and took it,” said Dianna Starr of Sacramento. “People I know say it’s a buyer’s market. No, it’s not.”

Starr, outbid by investors on several foreclosed homes in the $135,000 range is trying now to buy a short sale listing. That’s an equally frustrating problem for buyers.

In short sales, a bank agrees to a sales price below what it’s owed on the house. Complications abound.

Starr said in her case the main mortgage lender wants to sell, but lender JPMorgan Chase has balked at taking a loss on a home equity line of credit.

“I’m doing everything I can,” said the medical transcriptionist at Solano State Prison. “I’m a hard-working person that can’t catch a break.”

Regionally, the number of for-sale signs in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento and Yolo counties fell for a 23rd month. Sacramento researcher TrendGraphix reported 6,572 homes on the market in the four counties as July ended, the fewest in four years.

They’ve begun snapping up ready-to-build home lots at prices ranging from $25,000 to $67,000, setting the stage for a new suburban land rush.

The phenomenon suggests that a real estate market in decline for four years may be resetting for a new business cycle, some say.

Builders looking for land are focusing on “finished” lots, which already have government approvals, streets and utilities.

“They just have to pour a slab and start building,” said Kathryn Boyce, Sacramento analyst for Costa Mesa consultant Hanley Wood Market Intelligence.

Capital-area builders say prices for finished lots have risen 20 percent since April as giant public builders muscle back into the region’s land game for the first time since 2005.

Boyce said the land rush is greatest in Placer County, followed by Folsom and Elk Grove.

Hanley Wood counts 17,251 finished lots in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties. Many are owned by lenders that repossessed them. Others are owned by development firms that need to raise cash. Investors own still more.

The recent escalation in land prices has led some in the industry to question whether they can make money when so many homes are priced at $250,000 or less.

“Prices might be going up too fast,” said Tim Lewis, owner of Roseville-based Tim Lewis Communities.

Lewis recently bought lots at two projects in the capital region and one in Reno – his first in that city. “I’m cautiously looking at projects, but I’m certainly not on a buying frenzy like some of these publics (publicly traded builders) might be,” he said.

Even with the recent rise, land prices in the Sacramento region are nowhere near the dizzying levels of five years ago. At the height of the real estate boom in 2004, builders paid up to $150,000 for finished lots in Roseville, and up to $120,000 in Natomas and Elk Grove.

Still, the renewed scouting and buying by building giants has sent a buzz through an industry that has endured prolonged downsizing and financial trauma.

“There is a consensus out there that we are at the bottom or pretty darn close,” said James Radler, a Roseville-based land broker with Park Place Land Advisors of Irvine.

Radler and others say publicly traded home builders such as Los Angeles-based KB Home, Texas-based D.R. Horton, New Jersey’s K. Hovnanian Homes and Meritage Homes, headquartered in Arizona, are among those looking at lots and buying. Others in the game include private Arizona-based building giant Taylor Morrison. All are among the capital region’s top builders.

“These guys need lots,” Rad- ler said. “If they don’t do deals, they don’t build homes, and if they don’t build homes they aren’t in business.”

Most of the builders didn’t respond to Bee inquiries, which is not surprising, say those who watch the industry. Said Boyce, “They’re trying to position themselves without anybody knowing.”

“They all want to be under the radar as much as they can,” added Dean Wehrli, vice president and Sacramento analyst for Sullivan Group Real Estate Advisors of San Diego.

During the housing downturn that began after area home prices peaked four years ago this month, many large builders sold off home lots to maintain balance sheets. A few closed down divisions and left the area. Now, though capital-area home building remains sluggish – just 1,764 sales the first half of 2009 – firms are competing again for lots in a market they expect to begin rising as early as 2010.

Industry analysts say big Wall Street home builders, especially, need more lots to keep operations going while waiting for a new cycle.

“They essentially haven’t done any buying for four years,” said Radler.

The supply of lots is also constrained by the closing of Natomas to new building permits through 2011. That region, popular with buyers and builders for much of this decade, is under a building-permit moratorium until levee fixes bring 100-year flood protection.

It’s the newest count in a growing tally of foreclosures that claimed 4,448 more area homes in April, May and June, researcher MDA DataQuick reported Wednesday.

Statewide, lenders have taken back 410,744 homes since the start of 2007, including 45,667 in the second quarter, when they also sent default notices to 124,562 more homes. DataQuick said 10,682 of those defaults were in Amador, El Dorado, Nevada, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties.

Lenders issue the formal foreclosure warnings when homeowners fall three months or more behind on payments.

Analysts on Wednesday called the numbers a sign that the foreclosure crisis remains grim as the economy stumbles and unemployment has risen to 11.6 percent in the capital region and statewide. Widespread state government furloughs amounting to 14 percent wage cuts in thousands of area households – and the resulting economic contraction for other businesses – are also tightening the vise.

At area loan counseling centers like ClearPoint Financial Solutions, unemployment and lost income are now the new face of the loan crisis, said spokesman Bruce McClary.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of mortgage they have. It’s the change in income and financial circumstances,” he said.

The firm recently merged with By Design Financial Solutions, a nonprofit counselor with offices in North Highlands.

DataQuick’s quarterly report shows that many borrowers getting into trouble with mortgages aren’t escaping.

“It’s proof that there hasn’t been this huge shift toward workouts, whether that’s been a short sale or a loan modification,” analyst Andrew LePage said.

Santa Ana-based First American CoreLogic reported recently that 9 percent of home loans in Sacramento, Placer, El Dorado and Yolo counties were delinquent in May. DataQuick said that June counts of foreclosures and notices of default were up sharply from those in April and May, suggesting worse numbers in the third quarter.

In Roseville, Penny Krainz fears she will be one of those statistics. This week she got a 90-day notice that she would be losing her job at an area high-tech company.

“That ought to be right around the time they foreclose on my house,” she said Wednesday.

Krainz stopped making payments months ago, she said, on a house she bought in 2002 for $210,000.

A bigger house next door – a bank repo once valued at $379,000 – recently sold for $114,000, she said. That drove her into a category of borrowers who simply give up because they have high payments and owe so much more than the house is worth.

“This is so out of the realm of my upbringing,” Krainz said. “I would never in a million years not paid my mortgage.”

DataQuick reported that half the loans that defaulted in the second quarter were made before July 2006 and half were made afterward. Lenders that originated the majority of the troubled loans were Washington Mutual, a failed thrift taken over late last year by JPMorgan Chase; Wells Fargo; and Countrywide, the failed lender taken over by Bank of America in mid-2008.

Second-quarter foreclosures and defaults in area counties:

• Amador County: 29 foreclosures and 85 defaults.

• El Dorado County: 202 foreclosures and 632 defaults.

• Nevada County: 98 foreclosures and 286 defaults.

• Placer County: 515 foreclosures and 1,570 defaults.

• Sacramento County: 3,019 foreclosures and 6,862 defaults.

• Sutter County: 154 foreclosures and 355 notices of default.

• Yolo County: 216 foreclosures, 541 defaults.

• Yuba County: 215 foreclosures and 351 defaults.