CA VCS

Ventura County

Anyone wondering just how many Ventura County properties are being lost in the battered real estate market need only look at the foreclosure sales from the first half of 2007.

With 548 tallied through the second quarter, foreclosure sales have increased 784 percent compared with 62 in the first half of 2006.

It was the largest upswing among seven counties in the Southland region. Santa Barbara County's foreclosure sales rose 768 percent and Los Angeles County's jumped 675 percent.

The data, mined from the counties' recording offices by the Real Estate Research Council at California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, tracks the transfer of real property, commercial and residential.

The primary cause of the leap in foreclosure sales is the lax lending that went on in 2005 and 2006, said Michael Carney, executive director of the council.

"Lenders were apparently shoveling the money out the door," he said, adding that there were lots of dollars floating around when lenders were experiencing extremely high liquidity.

Another cause is that home prices leveled off and started to fall. "A lot of people are forgetting this," Carney said.

Borrowers and lenders made decisions assuming prices would continue to rise, he added, but that was a faulty assumption.

That's what Bob Majorino saw happen from his seat at the helm of Prudential California Realty in Ventura County.

Buyers only saw the bright side and did not plan ahead, he said, comparing the behavior to an ocean liner that hasn't prepared for a turn.

"A lot of buyers were trapped in the turnaround period," he said.

"As the market transitioned they kept buying. Unfortunately, the appreciation stopped so the cushion they thought they had was gone."

Foreclosure is the last step in a long process that most property owners are able to avoid. In the second quarter this year, roughly half, 54.6 percent, of the California homeowners in default emerged from the foreclosure process by bringing their payments current, refinancing, or selling the home and paying off what they owed, according to DataQuick Information Systems, a real estate tracking service. For the same period in 2006, it was 88 percent.

Early this week, Majorino took a team of Prudential employees out to tour the Oxnard properties that have been foreclosed upon.

"Looking around, I have to mentally adjust because I don't see this every day," he said of the change in prices.

"For 50 years," he said, "Ventura County has proven to be so resilient that it not only recovers from every downturn in the market but grows to new heights even further every time that happens.

"So the bottom line is, if you don't need to follow the pack and run scared, now is the time to get out there and shop. Find a nice home and hold it, and four to five years from now you'll be very happy you did."