California Seeing Near record Foreclosures

The foreclosure crisis in California is spiraling out of control, many experts say in regards to a new report released showing that foreclosure filings in California are now in excess of 500 per day.

Foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2008 totaled over 47,000 statewide, marking a 49% rise over the total of 31,000 recorded during the final quarter of 2007. While this is alarming for the future of 2008, comparing last year’s first quarter foreclosure rate with the current one shows that things have already increased staggeringly, with a 328% rise in the number of foreclosures year over year.

Experts attribute the reason for the incredible rises in foreclosure homes to the decline in property value due to the sluggish market, but this was aided in the beginning also by the huge surge in lending that occurred in recent years and has since restricted. With federal interest rates low, lenders handed out loans extremely liberally, and many of those homeowners are now finding it impossible to keep up with their mortgage payments and impossible to find buyers for their properties to avoid foreclosure.

Statistics also show that nowadays, roughly 1 in every 2 homes that goes into prolonged default ends up on the foreclosure sale block, up from every 1 in 3 homes one year ago.

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