Foreclosure and Housing Price News for the End of March

MONEY Magazine: Latest forecasts and projections for the nation's 100 largest metro areas show Bay Area home prices settling another 5% to 10% in the next 12 months.

Prices of U.S. single-family homes in January plunged a record 19.0% from a year earlier, showing a U.S. housing market that is still in the throes of a deep recession, according to a Standard & Poor's Case-Shiller report on Tuesday. S&P said its composite index of 10 metropolitan areas declined 2.5% in January from December for a 19.4% year-over-year drop, also a record. The 10-city index dates back to 1988.As of January, average home prices across the United States are at similar levels to late 2003. From the peak in the second quarter of 2006, the 10-City Composite is down 30.2% and the 20-City Composite is down 29.1%. The three worst performing cities, in terms of annual declines, continued to be from the Sun Belt. Phoenix was down 35.0%, Las Vegas declined 32.5% and San Francisco fell 32.4%.

Coming SOON to a Theater Near You – Beware of Foreclosure Scams by the Federal Reserve: To reach more homeowners troubled by foreclosure listings across the country, the Federal Reserve will use movie theaters to launch its advertisements warning homeowners about various foreclosure scams. The Fed will run its ads in 28 movie theaters in 14 large cities with the highest number of foreclosure listings.

Homeowners who applied for refinancing to avoid foreclosure accounted for almost 78.5 percent of the total number of mortgage applications. The seasonally-adjusted index of the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) for mortgage applications jumped by 30 percent as of March 20, 2009.

The California Association of Realtors posted some surprising stats today. Existing, single-family home sales increased 83 percent in February to an annualized rate of 620,410 homes. The statewide median price decreased 40.8 percent to $247,590.

“Home sales in California continue to be considerably stronger than the nationwide sales figures,” said California Realtors' President James Liptak. “The market will continue to register large, but diminishing year-to-year percentage gains in the coming months, as current sales are compared against the extremely low numbers that prevailed during the early months of the credit crunch.”

“The California median price has declined by a larger margin than the nationwide median price,” said the association's Chief Economist Leslie Appleton-Young. “This can be attributed to the under $500,000 portion of the market, which has experienced larger price declines than the other market segments due to the large share of distressed homes for sale.”