A recently released housing report shows that in the Coachella Valley area of California, a number of new homes entered foreclosure during August as a backlog of delayed bank repossessions trickled in.

240 Foreclosure Filings

According to RealtyTrac, a real estate information services firm, there were 240 foreclosure filings in the area in  August. That’s a 27 percent increase fro last August, and a 10.6 percent increase just from July. There are now three steps to a California foreclosure: notices of default, scheduled public auctions, and if the owner fails to pay what is owed during the default, the bank repossesses the house. These are called real estate owned sales, or REOs.

Expected Uptick

Analysts say this regional uptick of foreclosure filings might continue through the rest of the year. “We somewhat expected this,” said  Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac. “We always believed that there was a backlog in delay of foreclosures, but we don’t anticipate this overwhelming the market.”

Palm Springs-based broker, Jeff Litton, said that during the 2007-09 recession period he had a month where he managed 22 foreclosures. He was one of the earliest agents that worked with bank-owned listings. He was able to build a large portfolio of bank sales during the recession. But eventually, the number of foreclosures dropped to three a month. According to Litton, activity has been fairly quiet over this last summer. “Just recently, I’m starting to get assets from Wells Fargo and Fannie Mae,” Litton said. “It’s kind of picking up a little bit.”

Litton added that banks seem to be liquidating leftover inventory. As a result there has been a slight bump in foreclosures. “Many bank-owned properties have been vacant for a long time,” he said.

Still An Improvement from Years Prior

But despite this small uptick, overall Coachella Valley foreclosure numbers are lower than the levels of distressed properties during the recession. Two years ago there were 643 foreclosure filings for the month of August, that’s more than twice the number of August 2014.

Source: The Desert Sun, Foreclosures rising in the Coachella Valley again, September 21, 2014