Which part of the Santa Clara Valley
is seeing all of this foreclosure and pre-foreclosure activity?
Depending on where you live in Santa Clara County, you may be seeing a whole lot of distressed properties on the market – or you may be seeing none at all. This is part of our current “bifurcated market” situation.
Generally, the more expensive areas of Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, Cupertino, Saratoga, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos, Almaden Valley and Silver Creek) are not suffering from a huge number of listings in which the sellers are in financial straits. There are some, though.
It is the less wealthy areas in San Jose (including parts of downtown, the east side, south San Jose, Santa Teresa, Blossom Valley) and the south county cities of Morgan Hill and Gilroy) where there is an inundation with short sales – in the lower price ranges especially.
Generally speaking, most short sales, preforeclosures and bank owned homes are priced below $600,000.
How can you tell if a home is in pre-foreclosure?
Homes listed for sale in your neighborhood of San Jose, Saratoga or Los Gatos that are in pre-foreclosure may look like any others available. They may have granite in the kitchen, beautiful baseboard and crown molding, new dual pane windows, and on and on. The sellers may have borrowed and borrowed to improve the property, be unable to make the payments due to job loss, divorce, or other problems, and now be in default on a loan, heading toward foreclosure.
This status usually doesn’t “show” unless you have access to the county records or have a subscription to a service that lets you know the status (and those services are no where near 100% reliable, by the way). Your real estate agent, who should have a subscription to the MLS with full information, can see a report at no cost that shows the foreclosure history. (Not all pre-foreclosures are short sales.)
What’s a short sale? Being in “pre-foreclosure” means that the seller has missed payments on a loan in which the real estate owned is used as collateral, or security. Let’s say a home is worth $1 million, but the amount in default is a small loan, perhaps of $25,000. If the home is sold, it can pay off the debt in full.
Sometimes, though, a distressed seller bought higher than the home is now worth. When prices fall (and if the owner bought the home with a low down payment especially), selling the home will not be enough to pay off the loan. So again let’s imagine that a house is worth $1 million, but the owners owe $1.1 million on it (and to sell they have to worry about closing costs to boot). By selling the home, foreclosure can be averted – but to do so, the bank will have to agree to not being repaid 100%. This is a “short sale”. (Not all short sales are in preforeclosure, though, as not all home owners of these properties have missed payments on their mortgage.)
We’re seeing a lot of short sales in the entry level markets. In these cases, current owners bought their properties a year or two ago – for 10% or 20% more than those houses are now worth.
In the higher-priced regions of Silicon Valley, it’s less common to see a short sale than it is a straight pre-foreclosure because someone just can’t make the loan payment (due to some new problem like divorce or job loss, or because the adjustable loan went up and the payments are now untenable).
See also:
So you think you want to buy a Silicon Valley short sale?
Short sales sell but often don’t close: why?
Browse Short Sale Listings & Bank Owned Properties for Sale in Los Gatos
