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Foreclosures in San Francisco? And north of California Street? How can this possibly be?

By the way, Trulia says that 2901 Broadway is now available for only $48,000,000, marked down from its April, 2007 price of $55,000,000.

Farther north, huh? Inteteresting thing to say. Because the map which anchors the post sure doesn't look like it. According to that map all but 20 or so are south of Alemany. Nor does it on the foreclosure service I subscribe to.

So on that note, just for fun, "London is tanking."

Some of these asking prices seem oddly low. For example :

Franklin Street # 5, San Francisco CA 94109
Total views: 116 Last updated 7/6/08
$68,239
2 br 2 ba 1,565 sqft
Single-Family Home
From: RealtyTrac
Listing Type: Foreclosure
Status: Notice of Trustee Sale (Auction) What's this?
Year Built: 1922
Price/sqft: $44

There is a little something there for everyone! I always knew this story would end well.

Socketsite's map does not include anything but a small percentage of those in some stage of default/foreclosure.

The 782 number is also misleading as Trulia has lots of duplicate address listings. The real number is lower.

That said, the number is clearly growing and spreading north (limit the Trulia search to just the "immune" neighborhoods and you still get dozens of listings). And with the MLS sales numbers declining significantly, foreclosures certainly appear to now becoming a material factor in SF sales. Still an open question whether they will grow to the extent that they really begin to pull down prices significantly. But with sales slowing, you don't need too many more to have a significant impact.

I think ex SF-er nailed it in previous posts where he indicated that SF is acting just like other areas that have gotten hit by the housing crunch -- only about 18 months to 2 years behind in the trend.

Huh? I might be still groggy from the weekend, but this doesn’t appear to show a shift northward to me at all. If anything it looks like a larger portion of the foreclosures are concentrated south of the 280 than last time you showed this graph. What would be interesting to see is what percentage of these are concentrated in the southeast corner of the city versus what it was back in December. It doesn't appear to have proportionally shifted northward to me at all...might even be the opposite.

I am just curious....

I only recall SS covered ONE property went into auction. Maybe there were more...in any case, has anyone went to the auctions (or negociated a good deal with a foreclosure property)? I would like to know how it is done.

Since there are more foreclosures now, I am sure some SS readers can share some experience.

"That said, the number is clearly growing and spreading north (limit the Trulia search to just the "immune" neighborhoods and you still get dozens of listings)."

Without having the numbers for "immune" neighborhoods from earlier surveys, I'm not sure how you can say that. I'm not trying to firehose, but this all seems very open to interpretation. I don't think this means anything without some real numbers behind it.

"immune" neighborhoods" -- immune to what? The "reset tsunami" ?

Or immune to poor financial decisions? Well, nobody is immune to making poor financial decisions or ultimately getting into a foreclosure cycle. Do more monied people generally have the ability to stave off a courthouse sale, tho? yes, they do.

I subscribe to a superior service called Foreclosure Radar. I also get lists mailed to me weekly from two title companies. The amount of auctions coming up in the next few weeks north of Alemany street isn't particularly different from what I've seen since I began doing this last fall. People always get into financial difficulty regardless of where they happen to reside.

Just about exclusively, when you click on these auctions you'll see several postponements. That's down to the borrowers working it out. Plain and simple. Few indeed are the very good properties that are actually going to be resolved on the courthouse steps, folks. Does it happen? sure. Has it always happened? yep.

Example, there are exactly three auctions slated for 94114 right now. One of them is our favorite 869 Alvarado. It's now on its third postponement. This time it's slotted for 7/14. I'd be very surprised if this one is going to get foreclosed on. I could be wrong tho, of course.

Or 94123, with its three slated. One being another SS favorite, 755 Marina. That one has already seen legislation fly and is again supposed to be auctioned off tomorrow. We'll see.

Has anyone been to the courthouse steps? More than once? More than four times? (Fluj raises hand.) I posit that it is not helpful what's going on here, using Trulia as jumpoff to make uninformed conclusions. There are not many foreclosures happening in areas where people can afford to keep the wolves at bay. And that's not any different than six months ago.

It's a long, long way from NOD to foreclosure.

The numbers are growing, even in the better neighborhoods, but I wouldn't expect an impact on prices from the jump in NODs for at least 6-9 months.

The foreclosure map from Trulia is basically showing foreclosures that resulted from NODs 6-9 months ago, when the vast majority of the real problems were subprime loans.

Those loans were concentrated almost entirely in district 10. So initially, I'd expect to see a shift to concentrate more and more into subprime areas, as the normal random distribution of foreclosures all over the city gets drowned out by the subprime borrowers.

But then as the option arm loans reset, you'll see it start to shift. But note, the option arm NODs aren't going to be a big problem for 6 more months and then add 6-9 months on top of that before they show up in the foreclosure stats. So you just aren't going to see foreclosures become a big issue in the better areas for another year. Most of the trouble brewing in better areas is in option arms and those loans had longer terms.

Unfortunately, by then, congress will have been reelected and will be in no mood to spend a lot of public funds to try to solve the problem, not that any of their "solutions" have really made a dent.

So, foreclosures as an issue in better areas? At least in the short term, not gonna matter.

But it's different than a year ago, fluj, or 2 years ago. And that's the point. Gone are the days when, if you ran into trouble, you could just sell at a profit and not have to worry about stuff like this. Which implies prices have fallen, or at least aren't going up anymore.

Coincidentally, 835 Foerster, a failed flip in Sunnyside, is now a short sale being offered for $100K less than last sale. This was one of the places mentioned by Satchel in the 414 Foerster thread.

1150 Folsom #1 back on the market for $745K, after being purchased for $829K in 2005. This was a SocketSite feature.

And then there's this Monterrey Heights home:

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/rfs/741644493.html

A $1.5MM pre-foreclosure in West Portal? How many of these did you see 6 months ago?

Agreed, Dude. Those days are gone.

If 835 Foerster is a failed flip, it is a particularly bad one. They bought for 950K in the first place after an extended time on the market (for 2006 anyway). That was nearly 800 a foot for Miraloma Park -- not advisable. At this point they have twice tried to sell for only 989K. So there was no way they were ever going to make any money. In fact that makes me question what the heck really happened. But the way it's priced now, 849K and 512 a foot, is probably pretty appealing to a lot of people.

Apparently the buyer of the Fernwood property paid $1.725M, that's 850 a foot, in 2004! Ouch. The neighborhood has averaged 584 a foot over the last two and a half years.

Both of these are in keeping with my point. People have never stopped making poor decisions that lead them into trouble.

"People have never stopped making poor decisions that lead them into trouble."

Though in the bubble years the market was a lot more forgiving to those who overpaid. You could make a bad purchase decision, overpay for a poorly executed flip, and still make a tidy profit.

In the past the rapid appreciation insulated a lot of people from the effects of their bad decisions. Now with a more normal market, bad decisions are more likely to lead to trouble.

The default/foreclosure numbers for SF are steadily rising. So either the numbers of buyers making poor decisions have gone way up or the standard as to when a decision is now recognized as "poor" is changing.

I recognized above that the verdict is still out as to whether the increases in distressed properties will be substantial enough to drag down the broader market. Given the shrinking sales volume and the other bad economic news of late, this appears more likely than it did 6 months ago, but I accept that it could go either way.

That only goes so far too tho. Here neither of the two examples Dude gave would have found it possible to simply re-sell and let appreciation forgive all errors.

I don't think the number of foreclosures is yet at a level where it can directly influence the overall market.

Some distressed nabes are suffering, but that was expected.

Now, the effect on the resale market will still be felt but indirectly:

- These cases can be used as a cautionary tale: "what can be done" vs. "what cannot be done" vs. "what the hell are they thinking".

There will always be opportunities to "unlock" value, but they will not be artificially "made up" by mechanical market appreciation. Quality and vision will always be rewarded.

- The numbers will have to work for a flip/rebuild to succeed, which means people will not buy anything at any price. To sell a tear down at the same ppsf of regular fixers will not work as easily as before.

- The incompetent or the unwise I hope will be eliminated from the buyer pool.

"But it's different than a year ago, fluj, or 2 years ago"

No it isn't. The initial post says five and seven months.

I didn't crop that right. You said 1 year and 2 years was the point, and it wasn't. The point of the graphic and editorial stance was that over the past 5 to 7 months there has been a shift north. That's not correct.

Just adding my 2 cents to the hair-splitting contest. From the original SS quote:

“the shift to the southwest continues and is now pushing farther north as well.”

The quote does not state that the "North" is affected, but that the push is farther north.

"A hair splitting contest" is how you put it after I was specifically told that the point was a year or two. Funny. A year and a half ago was a completely different market! At a certain point you begin to talk about something else entirely. Even back to before last August it becomes something else. So, "hair splitting" ? No.

fluj,

Sure, But I wouldn't spend too much time dissecting someone's comment. This is pretty raw data and very much open to interpretation. For instance, how to interpret the big sudden cluster in Bayview? One can see a "push north" from Visitacion Valley or something like that. Same thing for the increase in Sunset reported problems. But we're dealing with statistics and I think it's better not to go too far into interpretation until we have a more complete and reliable picture.

I'm more interested by specific cases you mentioned: 689 Alvarado in particular. Auction scheduled (again). It really shows people are working hard to prevent foreclosures from happening where there's real value.

Yes, "spreading" is a better description than "shifting" North. The South areas of SF are not improving -- the other areas are just seeing more problems as well. Not surprising when the overall default/foreclosure numbers more than triple in 7 months. That the number of places in the North half of the city ending up at auction may or may not be growing in recent months (I've seen no data one way or the other) is relevant but not very much so as that's just a small part of the story.

The maps on this thread are not helpful as none of them depicts all the affected properties in SF but only an indeterminate slice. If you don't consider all the data, the output is worthless.

Bro,

There is dissecting language, and then there is being specifically challenged about differing time periods.

--fluj

I just counted with my index finger, but there only seems to be 75 or so flags in the newest map. Seems like there must be a TON of overlapping ones on the southern part of town?

Only a subset of the data points are plotted. For example, if you narrow the foreclosure search down to only the "Outer Sunset", "Central Sunset", and Inner Sunset", there are a total of 42 listings found. On the large map SS posted there are roughly 6 pins corresponding to these 42 listings. If you zoom in on an area on trula more of the pins show, so there are many more homes in some stage of foreclosure throughout the city than the map indicates at first glance.

Trulia doesn't seem to be particularly accurate.