Defaults, Foreclosure Spiking Across California

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In the echo chamber that is the 24-hour news cycle, a news item posted on The Drudge Report immediately becomes a bigger story. Some of you may not like this, but it’s true; Drudge is very influential in newsrooms, particularly television newsrooms.

That said, Drudge posts this link to a Reuters story that highlights surging default notices in California. Here’s the first two grafs:

‘SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - The number of mortgage default notices sent to California homeowners last quarter rose to its highest in nearly 10 years as home prices stagnated and rates on adjustable loans pushed higher, a report released on Monday said.

‘Mortgage lenders filed 46,760 notices of default from January through March, marking an increase of 23.1 percent from the previous quarter and 148 percent from the year-earlier period, according to a report by DataQuick Information Systems, a real estate information service.’

The LA Times’ David Streitfeld crunches the same numbers in this article on LATimes.com, and comes up with a different but very similar angle. He writes, ‘The number of Californians losing their homes to foreclosure rose in the first three months of the year to the highest level in a decade, a real estate information service said today, providing grim evidence that the shake-out in real estate is nowhere near over. Foreclosures totaled 11,033, up 802% from the placid levels of early 2006, according to DataQuick Information Services in La Jolla.’

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