California Foreclosures for June 2009

The June 2009 ForeclosureRadar foreclosure report for California was released today. It continued to show high levels of Notice of Defaults (NoD), Notice of Trustee Sales (NTS) and Trustee Sales.

A couple of points regarding the new foreclosure moratorium and it's effect on servicers. Even though many servicers are exempt from the provisions they are apparently taking extra time and slowing down filings as a result of the law. From the report:

A new statistic we are watching closely is the number of properties actively scheduled for sale – meaning that a Notice of Trustee Sale has been filed to set the auction date and time, but the foreclosure has not yet been sold or cancelled. Under California’s foreclosure code, a foreclosure sale can be postponed repeatedly for one year before a new Notice of Trustee Sale has to be filed. While postponements are quite common, they have reached record levels in recent months, swelling the number of scheduled foreclosures 90.1 percent year-over-year to 113,141.

“A number of lenders appear to have self-imposed California’s latest foreclosure moratorium on themselves, despite having received an exemption from it,” says Sean O’Toole, founder and CEO of ForeclosureRadar. “Given the number of exempt lenders it was quite surprising to see Notice of Trustee Sale filings drop by nearly 50 percent the day the new law went into effect.”

I went on FidelityAsap and download all the NTS that were scheduled within the last 7 days. I have been noticing on trustee posting sites that on the scheduled day of the auction many auctions are cancelled due with a cancellation date of 06/12/09. This date coincides with the Friday before the new California law went into effect. Unfortunately the download in which I can sort and do queries on shows the day of cancellation as the scheduled day of sale. But from my observation a significant number of servicers have cancelled many NTS and I am not quite sure if they are refiling or just plain holding off. I don't think ForeclosureRadar has yet caught up to all the cancellations due to the the posting sites are recording them but I think Sean will start seeing the bulk of the cancellations come through in the next month.

For the Trustee Sales scheduled for LA County pulled from FidelityASAP within the last 7 days I see the following breakdown:
1219 - Cancelled
314 - Back to Beneficiary
68 - Sold to third party
4589 - Postponed

As you can see the majority are being postponed. I think the Cancellations are more a one off event based on certain servicers overdoing their compliance with the new law. This is just one posting company and there are several out there but it gives a good idea of what is happening in the market. I will be posting a mid-month update for trustee sales on June 16th (first 11 business days of the month).

Note: I have added a foreclosure research link to the site, see here.