Free Financial Today

California foreclosures and how California leadership may deal with them is an important issue. Understanding just how the Golden State found itself dealing with such a large problem in the first place and how it began to experience this problem years before the rest of the country did is an interesting problem. Some of the issue deals with rampant speculation while some of it also deals with a failure of state leadership, it needs to be said.

When looking at something like CA foreclosures and the rate at which they’ve been increasing for the last several years it’s important to understand that real estate in the Golden State — like real estate in Florida or Arizona or Las Vegas — was doing a land office business for nearly a decade, beginning in the mid-1990s. Supply was being outstripped by demand and home prices went up accordingly.

The Golden State’s political leadership (just like political leadership in many other states) encouraged all of this buying and selling of real estate for several different reasons. For one, more home ownership meant more tax revenues, which encouraged municipalities and the state to add public services that would be financed by those revenues. However, everybody disregarded the fact that a boom is inevitably followed by a bust.

When it came to California, the beginnings of such a bust or drop in home prices probably started some time in 2006 though it’s the case that home values were still soft in places like San Diego and elsewhere for about a year prior to that. However, lax lending standards and low-interest rate money kept people coming into the market for a few more years before it finally all began to decline.

And decline it began to do starting around the middle of 2007. Once the financial markets themselves collapsed in late 2008, all of that speculation and buying and selling out in California dried up and blew away. It was then that real increases in CA foreclosures began to appear. California now has six out of the top 10 cities in terms of their rate of foreclosure, which is not a record to brag about.

California political leadership has been attempting to do something about the rate of CA foreclosures of late. For one, leaders are working closely with the federal government to bring people into certain federal programs that may help them modify their loans or get mortgage assistance. Also, California passed a law (due to expire in 2011) that has added an additional 90 days to the foreclosure process.

It’s hoped that loan modification and the extension of time (by 90 days) in the foreclosure timeline may encourage more homeowners to try to hold onto their properties, though the fact is median home prices in the Golden State have declined by 30 to 50 percent or more in many areas of the state. For those with homes worth far less than they owe, foreclosure seems to be an increasingly-common first resort, even.

Whether anything to do with the rate of CA foreclosures will ever be truly amenable to anything other than the natural corrections that market forces seem to impose as a matter of course is a question for the ages. Some think that the Golden State’s foreclosure rate may even be stabilizing and could even be dropping. Time will tell on that forecast, it seems.

Ca foreclosures are very real. If you are down about a Ca foreclosure, then there is useful tips out there, you just need to know where to look. The net is a great place to try looking.

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