Notices of Default up 24% in San Diego. Bankruptcy Lawyers

Notices of default up 24% in county
Analyst says February numbers might be fluke
By Roger Showley, UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

Friday, March 19, 2010 at 9:11 p.m.



Homeowners in San Diego County defaulted at their highest monthly rate in more than a year in February, MDA DataQuick reported Friday.

Defaults totaled 2,166, up 24.4 percent from January’s 1,741, the biggest one-month jump since the figure jumped 121.3 percent from November to December 2008.

Meanwhile, there were 973 foreclosures, down from 986 in January in the sixth month-to-month decline in the past year. The number was down 21 percent from year-ago levels.

More notices of default normally signal spreading distress in the housing market. As owners fall three months or more behind in their monthly payments, lenders usually file this first formal action that often leads to foreclosure. The number spiked a year ago, when lenders were catching up on a backlog of defaults delayed through extended noticing requirements and moratoriums.

DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage said the default rise last month might be a fluke.

“You can’t just read too much into a single month,” he said. “There’s been a very irregular (pattern) of notice-of-default filings.”

But LePage said he detected a similar uptick in counties throughout the state.

“The bulk was in the areas hit hardest” by economic and housing distress, he said, and did not reflect problems spreading to higher-priced properties as many analysts have been predicting.

“That’s not the way it shaped up,” LePage said. “It was more of the same.”

In his ZIP code breakdown of defaults in the county, LePage reported high percentage increases from January in several higher-priced neighborhoods. The actual numbers remained relatively low.

For example, Del Mar defaults were up 250 percent, but the increase was only from two to seven defaults; Solana Beach was up 120 percent, from five to 11; La Jolla was up 54.5 percent, from 11 to 17.

Meanwhile, some lower-cost areas continued to exhibit greater distress in absolute numbers. Nestor in the South Bay had 83 default notices, up from 53 in January and the highest of any ZIP code, followed by Spring Valley with 70, up from 44, and Encanto at 58, up from 53. All three had median home prices of $240,000 or less in the past 12 months.

LePage said it is possible that defaults will continue rising, given the high number of delinquencies that have been reported in recent months.

But Dustin Hobbs, spokesman for the California Mortgage Bankers Association, said a new program to speed up short sales — homes sold for less than the outstanding mortgage balance — may forestall many defaults as well as foreclosures.

“No one’s walking around with rose-colored glasses thinking it’s the silver bullet,” Hobbs said. “Certainly, it’ll be useful tool.”

He said the market is still unsettled because of the so-called “shadow inventory” of distressed homes that are delinquent or in default.

“It would be catastrophic if all of a sudden they all went to foreclosure,” Hobbs said. “We would have a huge, downward impact on home values, and no one wants that.”

In another report Friday, HomeGain, a Web site based in Emeryville that lists estimated home valuations, said real estate agents nationally are somewhat more optimistic about the market than a year ago.

Twenty-nine percent of industry professionals responding to a survey said prices are likely to decrease in the next six months, compared with 53 percent expecting a decline a year ago.

California was one of 10 states where more agents think prices will go up than down in the next six months.

The breakdown: 42 percent think prices will be unchanged, 36 percent think they will rise and 22 percent think they will fall.

Roger Showley: (619) 293-1286; roger.showley@uniontrib.com