The Healdsburg Foreclosure Market

Dave Roberts has a post up documenting new bank owned properties in Sonoma County. In his chart (that I'm reposting) he breaks down new REO's in the county by month and by city. Interestingly, it shows there is huge variance of supply by city each month. Cloverdale and Petaluma stand out in particular as foreclosures will jump back and forth between being practically nothing to soaring.

Healdsburg, as one might expect, has had very little action on the foreclosure front. Heading to Dave's Healdsburg REO map confirms this trend as we see there are but a few foreclosure within city limits. But can we expect more in the future?

Dave states in his post regarding the county as a whole:

There are continuing reports of a vast pipeline of foreclosed properties ready to hit the market. Only time will tell if that new surge in properties materializes. For now, this chart shows the modest and relatively small flow of Sonoma County bank owned homes into the marketplace.

My contention is that a wave of foreclosures will be hitting, and Healdsburg will not be immune from it. Heading back to Dave's map we see that one of the foreclosures he lists is at 1337 Lily Street for $275,000. It is one of the few foreclosures in the area, but if we take a look at ForeclosureRadar.com we see that trouble could be brewing on the horizon.

On Fuchasia Way just down the street there are 3 homes that have Notice of Defaults because they have stopped paying their mortgage. On March Ave in the other direction, just this past Tuesday, another Notice of Default was filed on a home less than a block away.

Looking at the loans it become clear how slowly this crisis is progressing. The loans were issued by New Century Financial (once the second largest sub-prime lender in the country, it filed for bankruptcy in 2007), GMAC Mortage Corp. (now government controlled), Golden West Financial (Option-ARM king which we have covered here), and Indymac Bank (the 4th largest bank faliure in the history of the United States). This is a who's who of troubled lenders but NOD's are just being filed and none are yet foreclosures.

This tells me we're just beginning this mess. In the months ahead there will certainly be more NOD's which will lead to more foreclosures.

ForeclosureRadar.com is a subscription service but in my mind is worth the money to real estate agents and home buyers that are interested in the foreclosure wave to come.

If you don't want to pay the subscription, another great source is the Field Check Group which publishes one free report a week based on ForeclosureRadar's data. Their last report describes a "brutal" last two months for the mid to high end real estate market.