According to the Chronicle (and RealtyTrac), while “Bay Area foreclosure activity skyrockets” in August, notices of default and trustee sales actually decreased on a year over year basis in San Francisco. And while foreclosure activity remains relatively insignificant right here (at least right now), we’ll keep you plugged-in should that start to change.
Bay Area foreclosure activity skyrockets [SFGate]
Bay Area “Notices Of Default” Heading North? (So To Speak) [SocketSite]

11 thoughts on “Bay Area Up But San Francisco Down (And That’s A Good Thing)”
  1. The SF foreclosure results really don’t surprise me much.
    I believe the proper analogy is that SF real estate is sort of like the residents and politics of SF when compared to the rest of the country….in a world of their own.
    But in all seriousness, my guess is that most people whose homes went in foreclosure were not single home owners or DINKs. They are likely married couples with 2.1 children and a Labrador who wanted to have a real single-family home, whether they could afford it or not.
    And there just isn’t an abundance of that demographic here in the city so of course foreclosures aren’t going to be as high as the more suburban areas of the Bay Area.

  2. The number of notices of trustee sales (indicative of actual foreclosures, rather than just being late on payments) in San Francisco plunged from 22 in August 2006 to just 7 in August 2007. And the number of notices of default (which indicate a risk of future foreclosure) was also down in in SF for August of this year compared to last.
    A very different picture than in the exurbs of east Contra Costa and than in the Central Valley.

  3. I wonder – was this a typo on the part of the Chronicle? It would have been easy enough to reverse the columns for 2006 and 2007.

  4. Surprising, but another instance of that old saw “real estate is local”. Esp. when markets are in transition or turmoil. I guess if you must have a bargain today, “take him to . . . detroit”.

  5. These numbers are curious. In late July 2007, Dataquick reported that from Q206 to Q207 notices of default in SF houses and condos jumped from 127 to 257, and recorded trustees deeds jumped from 9 to 49. Hard to believe that this very significant trend reversed course just a couple months later, particularly when the YOY trends reflected in neighboring counties remained unchanged or worse. Anyone know where raw data on this is available? I don’t see it on RealtyTrac.

  6. Could short sales be responsible for the somewhat surprising numbers on declining trustee sales? Perhaps lenders have realized the short sales are a viable option in S.F.- and they lose less money.

  7. If you go to Yahoo! Real Estate [ http://realestate.yahoo.com ] and type in San Francisco and select Property Type = Foreclosures, there are 391 properties listed from August 4th through today.
    One caveat is that most properties have a foreclosure status of Notice of Default. I’ve never defaulted on a property, so I’m not sure what that means as far as whether or not the property will actually be foreclosed on. But it’s interesting information.

  8. “Notice of default” is a warning that the borrower is in arrears in his/her payments.
    Most of these don’t go into foreclosure. As you can see in the chart on SFGate (linked at top), for August ’07, in SF there were 84 notices of default, but only 7 notices of trustee sales (which means that foreclosure is imminent).

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