Sinking home values and the collapse of flimsy mortgages fueled a record number of foreclosures in California in the first three months of this year, dimming prospects for any quick recovery in the housing market.
The number of homes lost to foreclosure rose to a record 47,171, more than four times as many as a year earlier.
Default notices -- the first step toward foreclosure -- were sent to owners of 110,000 California homes from Jan. 1 to March 31, according to La Jolla- based DataQuick Information Systems. That's about 1.4% of the homes in the state.
Defaults are up 143% from the same period last year. Homeowners in default can avoid foreclosure by catching up on payments, refinancing or selling. But fewer are doing so.
Just 32% of the properties in default will avoid foreclosure, DataQuick estimates, down from 52% a year ago.
That decline reflects the slow real estate market, which is being further weakened by the flood of bargain-priced foreclosures coming on the market, real estate experts say.
Those foreclosures are taking a bigger share of the home sale market. Statewide, foreclosures made up 33.1% of all home resales in the first quarter, DataQuick said, up from 3.2% a year earlier.
As with home values, outlying areas that attracted new-home buyers and speculators during the boom are being hardest hit by bank repossessions.
In San Francisco County, foreclosures accounted for 5.1% of resales, DataQuick said. But in San Joaquin County, which includes Stockton, 66.7% of all resales were foreclosures.
In San Bernardino County, Deputy Sheriff Mike Strickland says he is now delivering eviction notices to six or seven foreclosed houses a day, about twice as many as last year.
"It's full-bore now," Strickland said.
Most of the evictions are in new housing developments, he said, and the occupants have usually abandoned the property by the time he gets there.
"A lot of the homes were 5 or 6 months old. The people got in by the skin of their teeth," Strickland said. "They can't afford their payments, they skip."
Default notices were up the most in Colusa County, which posted a 305% increase over the first quarter of 2007. It was followed, in order, by Merced, Sonoma, Napa and Monterey counties, all of which recorded yearly increases greater than 200%.
Most of the loans defaulting last quarter originated from August 2005 to October 2006, DataQuick reported.
