Get On The Bus....

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By Howard Yune/Appeal-Democrat
November 28, 2007 - 11:41AM
From the lead of a sinking home market, a Yuba City real estate brokerage hopes to spin a bit of gold for some would-be house buyers. Some 25 people are expected to visit houses in north and west Yuba City during a unique tour Saturday – a tour of homes whose previous owners defaulted on their payments, caught in a wave of home-loan defaults that has drastically slowed housing sales starts in the Mid-Valley and nationwide. Buyers and agents could interpret the exhibition as a sobering sign of how far home values have crashed – or a chance to unearth bargains not seen for years while escaping the pitfalls that left their future homes vacant in the first place. “This is something that’s already happened and is beyond everybody’s control,” said Margo McLeskey, the ERA Showcase Real Estate Inc. broker organizing the tour series. “We’re trying to help people who couldn’t afford a house two or three years ago to get into the market in a healthy, strong way.” Saturday’s tour will be the second organized by ERA Showcase in the Mid-Valley since mid-October, and the brokerage plans six more events by the end of March. Similar tours are going on across the country. A bus will take hopeful buyers – along with Realtors and mortgage-firm officials – on a four-hour circuit of about 10 houses in north and west Yuba City, ranging in price from $200,000 to about $450,000. But first, the traveling party will first receive a half-hour seminar on the perils of aggressive borrowing – a legacy of the no-money-down and adjustable-interest-rate deals that first fed a vast expansion in home construction, then destroyed it. ERA Showcase’s program is starting in the wake of a spike in home defaults that has hit California’s inland cities especially hard. Third-quarter foreclosures in Yuba, Sutter and Colusa counties, for example, totaled 436 this year, compared to 161 in the same quarter in 2006, DataQuick Information Systems reported last month. Statewide, home defaults jumped from 27,218 to 72,571 from the third quarter of last year to the same period this year. A telling sign from the October event, according to McLeskey, was the presence of only one person intending to resell a Mid-Valley home rather than live in it. Among the numerous foreclosure victims nationwide are buyers who accepted adjustable-rate mortgages intending to quickly sell their new homes – only to be trapped when initially low monthly payments ballooned after a few years. McLeskey hoped such programs would turn local homebuying away from investment toward those moving up from rentals – and especially those priced out of ownership until now. “There’s nothing we can do about the past, but we can hopefully help people in the future,” said McLeskey. “It’s the reality of what has happened across the nation.”