Foreclosure Volume in Area Surpasses Last Year’s Record : Real estate: Though agents say market is stabilizing, uncertain effects of the Northridge earthquake loom.

Foreclosures in the San Fernando Valley region this year will shatter the record number set only a year ago. And real estate agents said that many residential foreclosures due to the January Northridge earthquake are just now coming up for sale.

Still, most observers expect the foreclosure volume to slow next year, and if the number of fire-sale properties begins falling, they expect local housing prices to stabilize, and perhaps start creeping up, within the next 12 months.

From January through November, 9,275 residential and commercial foreclosures were recorded in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, according to TRW-REDI Property Data in Riverside. That total already tops the 8,594 foreclosures reported in 1993.

TRW estimates that about 85% of the foreclosures involve residential properties, and that the remaining 15% are commercial properties.

By the end of December, the total number of foreclosures in the two Valleys could reach 10,100, surpassing by more than 20 times the 492 foreclosures recorded just four years ago, TRW says.

Foreclosures also soared in Ventura County, where there were 1,401 foreclosures through October of this year--the latest month for which data is available, TRW said. By the end of the year, the number of Ventura County foreclosures is expected to surpass the 1,635 reported in 1993.

The soaring number of foreclosures has upended the region’s residential real estate market. With banks selling foreclosed properties at deep discounts, prices of single-family houses in the San Fernando Valley have plummeted. The average sale price of a house last month was $220,500, the lowest average for the month of November since 1988, according to the San Fernando Valley Assn. of Realtors.

Analysts said the heavy foreclosure volume reflects the region’s continuing evaporation of aerospace and other high-paying jobs, which has left many residents unable to make their mortgage payments.

Even though job losses in the area were light this year compared to previous years, foreclosures continued to pile up because banks can take from four months to more than a year before repossessing the property of a homeowner who has stopped making mortgage payments.

“Foreclosure numbers are still going up because foreclosures are a lagging indicator of the trend in real estate and the economy,” said Nima Nattagh, an analyst at TRW-REDI. “The key is that the rate of increase (in foreclosures) has slowed down.”

Stephen Kaseno, a real estate agent at Jon Douglas Co. in Woodland Hills, said banks often set prices on foreclosed properties simply by matching recent sale prices on properties in the same neighborhood. “Banks want a market value price, but they want it as quick as possible,” Kaseno said.

As a result, individual homeowners who wish to sell often have trouble competing with bank-owned properties. “I have some private listings that I think are absolute steals, but I can’t give them away because they’re not” foreclosures, said Kaseno, who added that of the 100 houses listed for sale at his company’s office, about 20 are foreclosed properties.

Real estate agents also reported a rise in the number of so-called “short payoffs,” in which a bank agrees to accept less than full repayment on a mortgage if the property is sold.

“Foreclosures and short payoffs make up 25% to 30% of the business we’re doing,” said Kathy King, owner of King Realty in Sherman Oaks. “Four or five years ago there was no such thing as short payoffs, and we did almost no foreclosures.”

Foreclosure volume should begin subsiding next year, as the area’s economic woes start to fade, brokers said. But earthquake-related foreclosures are still coming to market, 11 months after the quake.

So far, “the trend in the Valley isn’t out of line with what’s been happening in the rest of Southern California,” Nattagh said. “The earthquake really hasn’t had an impact, and that could be because lenders are more lenient.”

Brokers said the quake-related foreclosures are trickling in, and more are on the way.

“The (earthquake) wave is starting right now,” King said. “That will flow over us for the next few months, and then you’ll see foreclosures fall off dramatically probably mid-year next year.”