There are about 12,000 homes that are pre-foreclosure which means the lender has sent the a notice of default.  About 65% should end up scheduled for auction.

There are currently 3421 homes scheduled for auction.  About 70% these will end up as bank owned properties according to Sean O’Toole at Foreclosure Radar.

There are about 5500 Bank owned properties in San Diego of which about 1800 are active listings in the San Diego MLS.  See the current list at www.houserebate.com/foreclosure.

Another 1000 San Diego foreclosures owned by banks are in escrow out of the total of 5,000 current San Diego Homes currently in escrow.  That is about 20%

Banks are motivated sellers.  They are willing to sell at market or below market prices.  Other home sellers may have emotional attachments to the price of the last comp which does not help when prices are going down.  San Diego REO properties are priced to sell.

Help may be on the way,  today I read in the LA Times, that investors are buying pools of bad sub prime loans and are actually contacting the homeowners to see if they want to lower the loan balance and monthly payments.   These investors can do this because they are buying these loans at a great discount.

I like the concept as the investors still make money and homeowners are helped.

I met with John Cooke at Mission Federal Credit Union  (www.missionfcu.org) today, and he said his credit union bends over backward to help their members in trouble by restructuring the loan.  The purpose of the credit union is to help its members. It was nice to hear a financial institution agreeing to rewrite some loans.  This has not been the case with most lenders.

I just heard about an auction put on by Auctiontoday.

Auctiontoday will be auctioning off foreclosure condominiums at the Bay View Towers.

There will be over 45 condos auctioned off with beginning price of $59,000.  What a deal.

When: Saturday May. 17, 2008
Where: San Diego Marriott Mission Valley. 
Time: Registration begins at 12:00 p.m. Auction starts promptly at 1:00 p.m.

HouseRebate can help you get a .50% rebate on the purchase of one of the condominiums.  Please call us for details.

You can generally get a very good deal on of these condominiums.

Real Estate Disposition Corporation (REDC) is the one behind the auction.  They have been auctioning homes since the 1990’s.