Tag Archives: nevada county real estate

Real Estate

Investing in Foreclosed Homes in Nevada County

money-tree

Smart investors are continuing to take advantage of the present foreclosure market. I don’t have an exact figure of how many foreclosures there are in Nevada County, but I just had one of my investors open escrow on two foreclosed homes in Nevada County. With some existing home prices under $200,000 in the county, there are some buying opportunities that are hard to pass up if you have the money to invest and willing to ride out the present downturn in real estate.

Continue reading Investing in Foreclosed Homes in Nevada County →

Real Estate

Pending Homes Sales Continue Upward

upward-sales-chart

Home sales continue upward in Nevada County, increasing by 7% for the period April, May and June of this year compared to the same period last year. Nationwide, they have continued upward for the fifth consecutive month, the first time in six years for such a streak, according the National Association of Realtors®
Continue reading Pending Homes Sales Continue Upward →

Real Estate

Nevada County Home Sales Up April to June 2009

sold-sign2

Nevada County homes sales increased in the three months of April to June, 2009 compared to the same period in 2008 by 14%. Sales for the three month period in 2008 were 203 housing units compared to the three month period in 2009 of 231 housing units. However, the average sales price dropped 17% in the three month period of 2008 which was $417,250 compared to $345,931 for the same three month period in 2009.

In addition the number of foreclosure proceedings started against California homeowners fell slightly in the April-through-June period compared with the prior three months, but remained higher than last year. The dip from earlier this year occurred as lenders and their loan servicers took time to revise procedures and priorities in an environment of continuing home price depreciation, economic distress and mortgage defaults, a real estate information service reported.

Lenders sent out a total of 124,562 default notices during the second quarter (April through June). That was down 8.0% from the prior quarter’s record 135,431 default notices, and up 2.4% from 121,673 in second quarter 2008, according to MDA DataQuick. The San Diego firm tracks real estate trends nationally via public property records.

“There is a perception that the housing market is dragging along bottom, that it probably won’t get much worse, and that the lenders need to get serious about processing the backlog of delinquencies, either with work-outs or foreclosure. We’re hearing that some lenders and servicers are doing just that, hiring more people to do the necessary paperwork. That means the foreclosure numbers will probably shoot back up during the third quarter,” said John Walsh, DataQuick president.

The median origination month for last quarter’s defaulted loans was July 2006, the same as during the first quarter. A year ago the median origination month was April 2006, so the foreclosure process has moved three months forward during the past 12 months.

Real Estate

Six Ways to Expedite Sale of Your Home

sold-sign

Selling a home fast in today’s market is somewhat of a challenge. Here are six ways to expedite a sale.

1. Cut the asking price to 10 percent to 15 percent below what comparable properties in the neighborhood are selling for. Pricing your home at current market price in a declining market is almost a guarantee that your home will not sell.

2. Spruce up the outside. First impressions, like a first date, make or break a sale. Update the landscaping. Power-wash the exterior and paint the door.

3. Spruce up the inside. Store all your nick-knacks. Get rid any clutter, make the inside a model home. Stage the home so people coming to view your home can make their own impression of the home, not your motifs. Examples, updated light fixtures and carpet, current paint colors, slipcovers for dated furniture.

4. Appeal to first-time buyers. Advertise on younger consumers’ favorite Web sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. Hire a photographer to shoot the house with a wide-angle lens so the rooms look bigger in online photos. We offer this service to all of our clients free of charge, including taking a video of your home to go onto YouTube and post your home on 32 websites.

5. Price the house in the lower end of the range. A $299,000 house is in the high end of the $250,000 to $300,000 range but a $301,000 home is in the low-end of the $300,000 to $400,000 range.

6. Do what you can to make the deal close quickly. Be ready to move, offer to pay part of the closing costs, and/or throw in a year’s worth of association fees.

What has been your experience in selling a home quickly? Let me know.

Real Estate

Hard Money Lender Tom Hastert Demands Jury Trial

Thomas Hastert
Thomas Hastert

It’s hard for me to imagine a man like Thomas Hastert a man who worked so hard to get ahead in this world becoming a felon. Hastert worked for the Nevada County Sheriff’s office, studied to become an attorney, then got his real estate broker’s license.

Once he got his broker’s license he proceed to engage in hard money lending in direct conflict with the law, making construction loans without fully funding them, a felony.

In addition, Hastert pleaded no contest to 62 counts of embezzlement, offering and selling unregistered and unqualified securities by false and incomplete communications. According to the Attorney General of California amounting to $20 million lost by his clients. That’s a lot of money to handle and lose. A standard fee for the mortgage broker Hastert is to charge is about 3 percent of the loan amount which means Hastert would have pocketed about $600,000.

Hastert’s attorneys and the California Deputy Attorney General Keith Lyon had reached a plea bargain that would have given Hastert five years in state prison. Normally that type of sentence means two and one-half years and he’s out of prison.

However, at the sentencing Judge Sean Dowling rejected the plea agreement and came back with his own sentencing of eight years and four months. Hastert’s attorney refused the new sentencing and demanded a jury trial.

I met Thomas Hastert some time ago, while he was an attorney. I did some investigations (as a civil engineer) for Hastert regarding building code violations for some of the real estate cases that he had. My impression of him at that time was that he was a nice person and I had no idea that he would resort to what he did. What does a person like that think? We have the Bernard Madoff, the Sir Walter Stanford’s who look you in the eye with a smile and steal your pocket book at the same time.

What do you think?

Real Estate

California Imposes Statewide 90 Day Foreclosure Moratorium

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really-you-got-to-stop-sign

California is imposing a 90-day moratorium on housing foreclosures under a new law that takes effect Monday, June 15, 2009.

The law is expected to make lenders try harder to keep borrowers in their homes. Loan companies must prove they tried to modify the delinquent loans before they can begin foreclosing.

But supporters acknowledge the California Foreclosure Prevention Act won’t stop thousands of foreclosures from eventually happening. There have been more than 365,000 foreclosures in California since early 2007, with many more already scheduled.

The law will largely press lenders to follow the Obama administration’s Making Home Affordable Program that began in March. That encourages lenders to cut interest rates or rewrite loans to 40-year terms to get payments below 38 percent of a borrower’s monthly income. Other options include reducing principal and tacking missed payments to the back of the loan. Under the law, California officials also can encourage short sales or deeds in lieu – options in which banks accept less than owed – for borrowers who want to leave or don’t qualify for modifications.

In summary, here’s what will happen starting Monday:

• Lenders will submit applications to the state outlining their loan modification programs. That gives them a 30-day exemption from a moratorium.

• If the state OKs a lender’s program, the firm is permanently exempt from the 90-day delay on foreclosures.

• If the state rejects the program as inadequate, a lender has 30 days to upgrade it and be reconsidered.

Leyes said consumers will be able to see a list of lenders that comply with the state’s requirements by mid-July.  

Source: The Sacramento Bee

Nevada County Home & Land Statistics, Real Estate

Residential Home Sales, May 2009, Nevada County

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picture-sales-going-up

In general, I track daily sales on from the Nevada County Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and there is a definite increase in sales lately. This is a good sign that people are buying, both investors and first time home buyers. Interest rates are very attractive now, and along with the bargains, the market seems to be shifting upwards. The market dynamics of Nevada County home sales from Terradatum are as follows:

Median prices of homes in Nevada County in May 2009 were $300,000 compared to the median price in May 2008 of $365,000 or a further decline in price of 18 percent.   

May 2009 sales decreased somewhat from April of 2009, with 59 closed sales in May versus 79 closed sales in April. However, sales from January 2009 to May 2009 were 272 closings compared to sales from January 2008 to May 2008 of 219 closings or a 24 percent increase in sales.

At the present time, there are 1,200 residential properties for sale or a 17.6 months inventory of homes.  If you have any questions, please e-mail me and I will glad to help you.

By the way, look on the left side of this page and you will see the daily postings of MLS stats under “What I’m Doing”. These stats include all sales, land, commercial, residential and multi-family for Western Nevada County.  They may include some sales from out of the area.

 

Real Estate

More Signs of Housing Recovery

california-map-increase-dec

While there may be another storm of foreclosures on the horizon, at least for now there are some signs of recovery for our housing market. California is the bell weather of the economy for the nation. Any sign that the housing market in California is recovering is a sign that the economy is recovering.

It’s the first back-to-back increase in the state’s housing prices in two years, following an increase in the median price of homes in March from February. The median price of $256,700 for single-family homes in April is up from a median price of $253,040 in March, according to estimates by the California Association of Realtors. (In Nevada County for the month of May the median has ranged from $295,000 to $280,000)

Overall the housing values in California increased 1.4% statewide.

The April prices were still off 36.5% from the same month a year ago, but the sales of 540,360 homes on a seasonally adjusted, annualized basis represented a 49.2% rise over the same time, the Realtors group reported Thursday.

April also marked the eighth consecutive month of single-family-home sales above 500,000 units. The inventory of unsold homes continued to shrink, to 4.6 months’ supply from 9.8 months a year ago. “It appears that the median price is now at or near the bottom,” said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the Realtors’ association, who has previously made more subdued comments.
“At best, some markets have at least temporarily leveled off in price,” said Andrew LePage, analyst at MDA Dataquick Information Services, a market-research firm in La Jolla, Calif. “I don’t see any markets that have clearly bottomed out.”

In general, the best-performing markets across the state in terms of sales volume were in lower-priced, inland areas that had seen some of the steepest declines in prices. Sales in the high-desert region outside Los Angeles, for example, more than doubled in April from the same month a year ago, after price declines of 49.5% over the same time. Median prices, even month to month, continued to fall there amid a glut of foreclosures.

But in several more densely populated areas, the median price was stronger. Los Angeles County’s median rose 1.9% in April from March, after falling 31% over the past year. In Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County, the median price rose 3.6% after a year-over-year fall of 38.2%, the Realtor’s group said. Boosting sales are some of the best affordability rates in almost a decade, say economists.
Realtors’ officials said sales remain weaker for more-expensive homes. Inventories of unsold homes in the under-$500,000 segment, for example, shrank to nearly three months’ supply in April from about 10 months a year ago. But the inventory of homes priced at more than $1 million rose to about 17 months from 10 months a year earlier.

The problem for the higher end of the market is that lending has tightened greatly for the jumbo mortgages that are often needed to buy a home costing more than $500,000, say economists. Some lenders now require down payments of as much as 30% to 40%. As a result, sales have remained anemic in pricey markets like San Francisco

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Real Estate

Investor Buying Fuels Home Sales

Home for Sale 18026 Jayhawk Drive, Lake Wildwood, not a foreclosure, MLS 103551
Home for Sale 18026 Jayhawk Drive, Lake Wildwood, not a foreclosure, MLS 103551

I was just asked by a client to make an offer yesterday for a home in Hayward that is in foreclosure. When I called the listing agent, she said there were two pending offers already! One of the reasons home sales have risen this year is the spike in investor groups in troubled markets that are buying up clusters of foreclosed houses from banks.

In many cases, investors are prevailing over first-time home buyers and other owner-occupants because they bring cash to the table.

For instance, in Phoenix where 38 percent of April sales of single-family homes were all-cash deals, Mark Allen, a former division president at D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest home builder, is working with Gorilla Capital, which specializes in foreclosures, to buy dozens of properties at courthouse auctions.

Barclays Capital estimates that banks and loan investors owned 765,500 foreclosed homes as of April 1, up from 629,100 last year. By 2010, Barclays expects them to have acquired about 1.3 million homes. When the market improves, these owners will try to sell.

“All this investor buying isn’t depleting supply, it’s only shifting it around,” Allen says.

Maybe, but a lot of investor’s are buying these homes, putting a little money into them and reselling at a profit to home owners, not investors. Others are buying for long term rentals. With prices this low, a lot of first time home buyers are now able to get into the market.

Real Estate

Foreclosed Homes a Buying Feast for Investors

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foreclosure-chart

Foreclosed home sales are going up here in Nevada County and elsewhere. The price of many of the foreclosed homes are making it affordable for investors to buy homes, do minor repairs and resell them for a profit. In many cases, mom and pop buyers are in the market to get a few rentals. But the big boys are into the market now, knowing that this is a buying opportunity a lifetime.

According to the Wall Street Journal:

“The pace of housing sales has been rising in many markets this year, but it is only partly because families seeking affordable housing are returning to the market.

It also is because of investors like former Deutsche Bank managing director Matthew Cooleen, whose firm has spent $30 million buying pools of foreclosed houses from banks.

His newly formed Greenwich, Conn.-based firm, HudsonCross Financial, is betting it can make a profit reselling in beaten-down markets in states like Nevada, Arizona and Florida and in Southern California because it is paying so little for the homes.

In Phoenix, Mark Allen, a former division president at D.R. Horton, the nation’s largest home builder, is reselling homes he is buying at courthouse auctions with funding from Gorilla Capital, an Oregon-based firm that targets foreclosures. “It’s the only way to make money in Phoenix residential real estate right now,” Mr. Allen says.
After mostly retreating from the housing market after the bubble burst, investors are returning in droves, hoping to take advantage of the distress. In many cases, Realtors say, investors also are outbidding first-time home buyers and other would-be occupants because they often come to the table with all-cash offerings.

“Foreclosures are low-hanging fruit at the moment,” says Laurence Pelosi, who helped close big land and housing-development deals for Morgan Stanley before he left the bank earlier this year and joined McKinley Partners, a small investment firm that is buying foreclosures in California.

McKinley and a partner are in contract to buy four homes in Pittsburg, a small city east of Oakland. The firm is buying one house, which was valued at $412,000 near the peak in 2005, for $84,000. McKinley plans to rent out the homes for as much as $1,200 a month. After paying to manage the property and other expenses, it expects 5% to 7% returns on its investment from the rental income and, hopefully, a big payoff from a resale when the market improves.”
“Foreclosures are low-hanging fruit at the moment,” says Laurence Pelosi, who helped close big land and housing-development deals for Morgan Stanley before he left the bank earlier this year and joined McKinley Partners, a small investment firm that is buying foreclosures in California.”

By the way, if you are in the market to buy foreclosed homes, please contact me at E-Mail John O’Dell or use the contact page. Thanks