Valley saw surge in foreclosure filings in 2008

By Sue McAllister,
Mercury News

Here's a somber statistic for Silicon Valley: Foreclosure activity increased at a faster clip in Santa Clara County last year than in any other California county, a foreclosure information service said Tuesday.

Foreclosure filings rose 239 percent from 2007 to 2008, according to a report from Default Research, a Pennsylvania company that gathers its data from public records. A total of 18,610 properties in the county entered into some stage of foreclosure in 2008, the company said, up from 5,491 in 2007.

Santa Clara County witnessed last year's fastest-growing foreclosure problem partly because the county had relatively few foreclosures in 2007 compared with other large counties, said Serdar Bankaci, founder of Default Research. But as home prices in some parts of the county fell sharply in 2008, mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures here increased steeply.

"The southern part of California really got hit harder earlier on," he said. "It was just kind of a lag. We're seeing a lot of the Northern California areas were hit hard later in 2008."

Bay Area counties such as Contra Costa and Solano — popular with first-time buyers who were able to buy with small down payments during the housing and mortgage boom — saw more dramatic increases in foreclosure filings between 2006 and 2007 than did Santa Clara. Santa Clara County, in effect, played catch-up with that trend in 2008.

Solano and Fresno counties had the next-most-severe increases in foreclosures last year, with filings up 180 percent and 179 percent from 2007, respectively. In Solano County, 12,908 properties were in some stage of foreclosure in 2008, while in Fresno County the total was 15,360.

In its data Default Research included both "notices of default," and "notices of trustee sale," which come at the beginning and end of the California foreclosure process, respectively. But Bankaci said his company counts each property only once, although property owners receive multiple notices during the foreclosure process.

Though the 239 percent increase in all types of foreclosure filings appears severe, the figure is not as eye-popping as some of the increases in actual foreclosures that occurred during individual months of 2008. For example, according to Discovery Bay-based foreclosure information company ForeclosureRadar, foreclosures — usually marked by an auction at a courthouse or other public venue — increased 365 percent in July 2008 compared with a year earlier.

In terms of raw numbers, Los Angeles, Riverside and San Bernardino counties still dominated the state's foreclosure-filing woes last year.

Los Angeles County had 122,408 properties in foreclosure, the most for any county, according to Default Research. Riverside came in second with 82,072 foreclosures filed, and San Bernardino ranked third with 64,144. Los Angeles' figure represented a 107 percent increase. Filings rose 133 percent in Riverside and 147 percent in San Bernardino.