January 19, 2006


Just as it led the way up to a housing boom, San Diego County seems to be leading the real estate market down, with a lower rate of price appreciation and fewer sales last year than other counties in Southern California, DataQuick Information Systems reported yesterday.


The six-county region registered a price increase of 16.5 percent last year to reach an overall median price of $460,000. By contrast, San Diego County real estate prices rose 7.6 percent over those for 2004, the slowest annual increase since 1999, to a median of $494,000.


Sales regionwide totaled 355,698 last year, down 0.4 percent from 2004, with sales in San Diego down 9.1 percent at 55,366.


December was somewhat similar. Prices regionwide were up 13 percent from December 2004 to $479,000, while San Diego real estate prices rose by 5.1 percent to $516,000, on a year-over-year basis.


Sales last month in Southern California totaled 29,952, down 4.5 percent from December 2004, but San Diego County was second to Los Angeles County in the rate of decline. L.A.-area sales were down 13.6 percent, while the number of transactions in San Diego fell 11.3 percent.


San Diego County, which weathered a severe real estate downturn in the early 1990s, began pulling out of the recession earlier than the rest of the region and has had successive yearly price increases since 1996.


Los Angeles County experienced an even worse downturn and came out of the recession last, economists have noted.




February 1, 2006

February 12, 2006


San Diego County mortgage default notices rose more than 34 percent to 1,173 in the final quarter of 2005 compared to a year earlier, and are likely to double in the near future, according to DataQuick Information Systems.


The locally based company said defaults for the year stood at 3,933, compared to 3,263 in 2004, but the total was far below the peak of 16,520 reached in 1996 at the tail end of the last local recession.


Statewide, defaults in the October-December period were up 15.6 percent with 14,999 actions.


Notification of default from lenders is the first step toward foreclosure for failure to make mortgage payments. But DataQuick said generally only about 5 percent of such notices ever lead to foreclosure because owners are able to make the overdue payments or sell their properties and pay off their loans.


Last year, only 212 homes were foreclosed on in the county ? a fraction of the thousands lost annually in the mid-1990s. At that time, as many as 20 percent of defaults did lead to foreclosures, records show.


In other areas, fourth quarter default notices rose by 43.1 percent in Riverside County; 34.2 percent in Orange County; and 10.7 percent in Los Angeles County. The San Francisco Bay area increase was 10.5 percent and Central Valley counties were up 26 percent.




February 12, 2006

February 24, 2006


Who in the world knows why.


In some cases, it's something of a mystery: People giving up on their real estate by failing to pay property taxes.


People giving up on San Diego real estate.


Today, more than 80 parcels ? mostly empty lots and time shares ? will be up for auction because the property owners haven't paid taxes on them for the past five years.


Maybe some consider the property garbage, stuck way out in the middle of nowhere and unsuitable for development. Maybe the people owe more than they think the properties are worth.


Or maybe they get their financial advice from their cats.


Regardless, the county will put the properties on the block to get back the taxes owed.


?Some people just think it's easier to walk away from the property than pay up,? said San Diego County Treasurer-Tax Collector Dan McAllister.


He's getting bigger space for today's auction.


Last year, 500 people crammed the room in the Community Concourse, next to City Hall, for the 70 properties offered. This year, the event will be held in the Convention Center, beginning at 9 a.m. Every year the crowd swells, he said.


?People think, wow, this is my chance,? he said. ?Real estate is what everybody talks about.?


The parcels are spread throughout the county. But go figure: None are in Rancho Santa Fe.


Twenty-five of the parcels are so-called ?unimproved? properties, meaning empty lots or rural acreage. Fifty-six are time shares, while the remaining three are structures, which include houses.




February 28, 2006

February 26, 2006


WASHINGTON ? Nope. Still not yet.


According to the first official government numbers you're likely to hear about in the coming weeks, the run-up in housing prices continued unabated in the fourth quarter, ending 2005 with a whopping 16.1 percent gain over the year before.


In other words, the widely anticipated slowdown in home-price appreciation has failed to materialize, with many of the nation's most affordable ? and, heretofore, most sensible ? markets finally joining the party.


That's not to say costs are starting to cool in the always-hot coastal markets. But Midwestern cities like Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Milwaukee turned in some unusually strong gains ? 31 percent in Indianapolis, 29 percent in Cincinnati and 25 percent in Milwaukee.


Of course, prices in those and other places aren't rising at nearly that fast a clip. Rather, in the fourth quarter people purchased an abnormally large number of houses in the upper price brackets and fewer-than-normal less-expensive models.


Such an inversion always skews averages higher than they should be, just as a larger-than-usual number of purchases in the lower echelon of the price range makes it look as though prices are falling when, in fact, they are doing anything but.


But the point is that despite cautionary tales of bubbles bursting and houses being lost to foreclosure because financially strapped owners can't sell them for what they paid, people are out there buying away. And not just buying, either, but buying more expensive houses. Sometimes the most expensive houses they can finance.




February 28, 2006

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