April's Foreclosure Numbers For Santa Barbara County

Here it is May Day and the numbers are in. I'm not sure how the county gets them posted on their site so quickly but all the numbers of Notices of Defaults, Notice of Trustee Sales, and Trustees Deeds are complete for April.

The good news is each of those numbers went down from March. The Notices of Defaults went down from looks to be an all time high of 414 to 298. That is a significant drop and would appear to be more of a number you would expect. The 414 number would appear to be elevated because of the moratorium that had been put on recording Notices of Defaults.

Notices of Trustee Sales dropped from 203 to 189. Again the number went down and is far from the high of July of last year which was 305. The rest of the year will be interesting to see how this number goes. I certainly am hoping that all the new programs that are in place will keep people in their homes.

The number of Trustees Deeds that were recorded in April were down as well. April had 74 which is very low and hasn't been lower since July of 2007. That is really good news. It means less banks are taking back property. I wish I could explain what exactly is happening. I would welcome any insight in to this situation.

The bad news of course is that foreclosures and the process of foreclosures hasn't really stopped. There are still a significant amount of properties in one phase of foreclosure or another. I do believe there are some signs of them slowing up and hope that I am right.

I do know that many of the foreclosures are selling in the Santa Maria and Lompoc areas.