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Foreclosures stay low in San Diego

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Foreclosures and default notices in San Diego County didn’t change much from February to March, but are still down significantly from a year ago, real estate tracker DataQuick reported Tuesday.

Last month, banks repossessed 142 homes in San Diego County, one more than they did in February. However, the March total was down from 249 a year earlier. Default notices, which trigger the 90-day foreclosure process, rose from 442 in February to 460 in March, but are still down 25 percent from March last year.

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“That bulge of activity for the huge amount of defaulted loans is behind us now, and looking forward we should be considering issues that are more ordinary in our market,” said Mark Goldman, a loan officer and real estate lecturer at San Diego State University. Goldman said those issues could be employment and income, essentially factors that contribute to someone’s ability to continue own a home.

Default notices and foreclosures have been on the decline since the Great Recession, as San Diego County home values recovered after the collapse of the housing market. The newfound equity has allowed people who can’t pay their mortgages to sell their homes, since they now owe less than the property is worth.

For March, foreclosures peaked at 1,137 in March 2010, the year after the recession. Default notices rose to 3,382 in March 2009 before beginning their decline.

For the quarter, San Diego County had 432 foreclosures, down from 882 in 2013’s first quarter. The county saw 1,392 default notices filed in the first quarter, down from 1,471 in the first three months of last year.

The state also had a decline in foreclosures from last year’s first quarter, but saw an uptick in default notices from last year, which could be due to new rules that went into affect via the California Homeowner Bill of Rights.