The report from San Diego’s DataQuick highlights how the foreclosure crisis appears to be subsiding after running rampant for five years.

“For more than a year, the general trend has been down” for legal filings that indicate mortgage distress, said DataQuick analyst Andrew LePage.

There are several reasons that foreclosure activity is trending down. As home values have risen over the past year, fewer homeowners are underwater, which means they can more easily refinance or sell their homes if they have trouble keeping up with their mortgage.

Financial hardship is also diminishing. “The other big factors are the pickup in the economy and the improvements in job growth that keep people from getting in trouble in the first place,” LePage said.

On top of that, various new laws and legal settlements between banks and the government encourage lenders to pursue alternatives to foreclosure, such as loan modifications and short sales (selling for less than is owed on the mortgage).

While LePage noted that the effects of the law and settlements are hard to measure, the net impact is fewer foreclosures.

Most subprimes gone

Moreover, the bulk of risky subprime loans have already gone through foreclosure. Mortgages issued from 2008 “were safer and saner,” LePage said, meaning they are unlikely to have the sharp payment spikes of teaser-rate subprimes.

For the fourth quarter, DataQuick reported that 5,399 households in the Bay Area received default notices, the first step in the foreclosure process. That was down 46.1 percent from the same quarter of 2011. About half of default notices become foreclosures.

Although lenders can file notices of default once borrowers are three months behind, DataQuick said that Californians receiving the notices were a median of eight months in arrears on their primary mortgages.

Statewide, notices of default were down 37.9 percent in the quarter, to 38,212.

Trustee deeds, the final step of foreclosure, were issued for 2,765 Bay Area homes in the fourth quarter. That was down 42.8 percent from the same quarter of 2011.

Statewide, trustee deeds were down 32.4 percent, to 21,127 in the fourth quarter.

Looking at the full year also showed declines. The Bay Area had 30,046 default notices in 2012, down 30.7 percent from 2011. The nine-county region had 1,907 trustee deeds in 2012, a 41.2 percent decline from 2011.

While the numbers are the lowest in six years, many homeowners still struggle to keep their houses.

Oakland’s Peggy Hart, 61, for instance, said income from her day care business took a big hit a few years ago. Three years ago, when she first applied for a loan modification, bank representatives told her to stop paying her mortgage and she complied, she said. Wells Fargo gave her a loan modification early on, but the payments were still too high and she was unable to keep up, she said.

Changes are tough

Now her business and her income have rebounded, but her efforts to get a loan modification have been frustrating and unsuccessful, she said.

“I’m able to pay, I want to pay my mortgage,” she said. “I told (Wells) on the phone, ‘Please let this happen for me.’ “

Hart lives with her two sons, granddaughter and a baby great-grandson in the house, where they also run the day care. She owes about $200,000 on the house, which various real estate sites estimate is worth at least $390,000.

“Wells Fargo continues to work with borrowers on mortgage modifications and other options that may help them remain in their homes and avoid foreclosure when possible,” the bank said in a statement. “We have been working with Ms. Hart for over three years to identify an option that would allow her to retain this home. We were able to provide her with some temporary assistance in September 2009 while we continued to look at home retention options.”

Both foreclosures and notices of default remain more common in lower-cost areas, DataQuick said.

Over the past five years, 1.1 million of California’s 8.7 million houses and condos received a foreclosure notice, it said. Of those, 780,000 were actually lost to foreclosure. The others were either sold or the payments were made current.

At the courthouse auction where the final step of foreclosure takes place, about 42 percent of properties in the fourth quarter were purchased by investors, DataQuick said. That was up from 31.2 percent a year earlier.

Fewer foreclosures

Fewer people in the Bay Area and California lost homes to foreclosure in the fourth quarter compared with a year earlier; and fewer received notices that they were behind in payments. For the full year, both notices of default (the first step in the foreclosure process) and trustee deeds (the final step of foreclosure) were down compared with 2011.

Notices of Default

Houses and condos, fourth quarter

Trustee deeds recorded

Houses and condos, fourth quarter

Sources: DataQuick, DQNews.com

Carolyn Said is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: csaid@sfchronicle.com

Article source: http://www.sfgate.com/realestate/article/Foreclosures-drop-in-Bay-Area-California-4218858.php

(Read More: Homeowners With No Mortgage Offer Clues to Recovery)

“House price improvement has been the biggest reason we’ve seen more confidence improving in general, and prices are taking a stronger hold out West,” said David Crowe, NAHB’s chief economist, who notes that monthly regional moves can be more dramatic. A three-month running average, however, still puts the West ahead of the rest of the nation.

Builders out West have also been heartened by a huge drop in distressed properties, thanks to an influx of large-scale investors looking to reap the rewards of a growing single-family rental market. As supplies of homes for sale drop there precipitously, the builders are moving in again.

(Read More: Banks Pay Big for Robo-Signing…Again.)

Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/100384154

“They were not the prettiest miles I’ve ever run,” the San Anselmo resident said.

The last mile was No. 98,741 of Fanelli’s 42-year amateur-running career. He’s planning to pass the 100,000-mile mark Nov. 18 at the Philadelphia Marathon, the site of his first full marathon in 1972. It’s impossible to know exactly how many runners have reached 100,000 miles; Fanelli, a San Francisco-based real estate agent, said he’s been told the number is less than 60, which sounds plausible considering you’d have to run five miles a day for 54 years and eight months to reach the milestone.

“I really enjoy overcoming challenges. It lends great perspective in everything else you do,” he said. “When I’m having a difficult time professionally, I can always reach back and say, man, this is nothing compared to X, Y and Z.”

Fanelli, who turns 56 on Tuesday, first took an interest in running in 1968, idolizing Tommie Smith and John Carlos as they caught the world’s attention at the Mexico City Olympics.

“I wanted to be like them,” he said. “I couldn’t wait to start running track and cross country.”

The sport quickly changed Fanelli’s life. It taught him discipline, focus and goal setting — things that he’d lacked as a youngster flirting with the law on the streets of Philadelphia.

“Athletics is a great way to stifle that activity before you get into real trouble,” he said.

Fanelli started logging his miles in a yellow notebook every day as a 14-year-old, but he was just an average runner in high school. In college, he matured physically and learned how to be scientifically meticulous with his training regimen. He set a 10,000-meter San Francisco State record that still stands.

Other career highlights include running 5,000 meters in 14:37, winning the San Francisco Pacific Rim marathon twice and coaching the U.S. national team at three international competitions.

In the 1980s, Fanelli took up ultramarathon running, competing in races up to 100 kilometers; recently, he reinvented himself as a short-distance, 800-meter runner (two laps around the track), earlier this month, he qualified for the 2013 Summer National Senior Games in that event.

Fanelli said once he hits the 100,000-mile mark and passes 500 consecutive days, he’d like to get back into coaching, this time at the youth or high school level.

“Coaching is a very fulfilling part of giving back to the sport that’s been so good to me,” he said.

Article source: http://www.sfexaminer.com/sports/2012/04/even-surgery-can-t-slow-bay-area-road-warrior

How do I loathe home price day?

Let me count the ways.

The rash generalizations, the seasonal vs. non-seasonal adjustment confusion, the month-to-month vs. year-over-year, the contention among all the varied home price reports from the various and varied entities that track them.

I could go on, but if you are a regular Realty Check reader, you’ve heard all this before.

This month is particularly frustrating, because the big headline from SP/Case Shiller was that home prices rose for the first time in eight months. Okay, yes, from March to April, with no seasonal adjustments, home prices rose barely, less than one percent, in the nation’s top 20 housing markets. When you seasonally adjust those numbers, the prices fall. Why?

Because in different seasons, different types of buyers buy different types of homes.

The Spring market is historically replete with families; these are move-up buyers, purchasing larger, more expensive homes. That skews the overall prices higher. They buy in the Spring because they want to move over the summer, when school is out. You tend to see more single and first-time buyers in the fall.

This is why I judge prices year over year, because you are comparing apples to apples. Prices are down in 19 out of the top 20 markets year-over-year, with six markets hitting new lows on the SP/Case Shiller Home Price Index.

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Article source: http://www.cnbc.com/id/43564196?__source=RSS*blog*&par=RSS