Bay Area Reeling Under The Weight Of Foreclosures

June 5th, 2008

Around 2% of the U.S. households went down with some heavy blow of foreclosure during the month of April. Foreclosed real estate properties continue piling up heavily with the addition of homes on the market and the dragging down of real estate prices. The impact has been felt mostly with foreclosure concentrations in areas like Southern California, Las Vegas, South Florida and areas of Arizona. The hardest hit in recent times seems to be the Bay area. Bay area and Florida foreclosures in fact seem to be on a continuous roll, moving upwards continuously with the passage of time.

The foreclosure filings that took place in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando counties from January 2007 to January 2008 have also been plentiful. The mortgage crisis resulting in the foreclosure call in these neighborhoods has not been new, while repossessions by banks and auctioning of properties have also been frequent. As ForeclosureRadar.com investigated, last month’s foreclosure count has gone up to 22,838 on a state-wide level in the entire South Bay area. That is in fact an average of 1,038 homes being auctioned off with daily business transactions. Business in the real estate market in April has been filled with these incidents, as reported by President and founder of ForeclosureRadar.com, Sean O’Toole.

The Santa Clara County has seen 500 properties foreclosed in April itself. This was a 47% rise since March of this year. As compared to April last year, there has been a 585% increase in overall properties getting foreclosed. The county of Santa Clara ranked 40^th among other Californian counties in terms of foreclosures taking place per capita. The total amount of loans being foreclosed upon the county the previous month was $292.4 million at one go!

When a mortgage or money lender or loan servicing company files a notification process of default over any property, the foreclosure process starts to begin. However, a few months into the property ownership, when the mortgage payments cease, then the owner is also unable to sell off the property concerned. This generally takes place four months later, after the foreclosure process sets in, and the owner has stopped paying the monthly mortgage installments. If the owner fails to get up to date with his payment the property gets foreclosed. It then gets foreclosed with an auction sale as a concluding process, or it could even get ceased by the bank or get auctioned off at the court or any other such legal public venue.