O.C. Joins Statewide Foreclosure Decline

With housing prices and sales up, home foreclosures in California tumbled in September to the lowest level since July 1995, a real estate data service reported Friday.

The trend was especially pronounced in more expensive areas, where the turnaround in the market has been greater, officials at Acxiom/DataQuick Information Services said.

For example, Orange County’s foreclosure counts in August and September were the lowest since 1992, said John Karevoll, a DataQuick statistician.

Lenders moved to seize the homes of 10,232 Californians who were behind on their mortgages in September, down 3.9% from August and down 16.4% from September 1996, DataQuick said.

The decline was sharpest in Southern California, where a severe recession and plunging home prices in the early 1990s had created the biggest problems.

A backlog of unsold foreclosed properties can depress home prices long after the general economy begins to recover. So declining foreclosure numbers should support the recent trend toward higher prices, real estate experts say.

Even in hard-hit areas such as the Moreno Valley, near Riverside, foreclosures have begun to ease. In only two regions of the state--the battered Palmdale-Lancaster area of north Los Angeles County and the San Joaquin Valley--have foreclosures failed to drop, Karevoll said.

With the price increases of the past half-year, fewer homeowners will be willing to let lenders seize their houses, said DataQuick President Mike Ela. “We expect foreclosures to drop another 50% by spring,” Ela said.

County figures for home foreclosure proceedings begun in September:

* Los Angeles: 3,065, down 21.3% from 3,897 a year earlier.

* Orange: 714, down 22.6% from 923.

* Ventura: 145, down 37.2% from 231.

* Riverside: 996, down 3.1% from 1,028.

* San Bernardino: 986, down 12.4% from 1,126.

* San Diego: 495, down 44.3% from 889.