Santa Barbara County Loan Activity for December 2007

Lending Institutions have certainly been seeing more than their fare share of the front page of many newspapers these days. If you read all the headlines you wouldn't think there were any left to do loans. Well there are and the loan programs I'm hearing about are pretty darn good. The County saw over 900 new residential loans and over 320 million in loan dollars in December of 2007. If you ask me that sounds like the lenders are lending. The Santa Barbara area had a slight increase in the number of non purchase loans done with a small decrease in the number of purchase loans. These numbers haven't changed much in the last 4 months. In the Santa Maria area for December there was a slight increase in the number of purchase loans and a slight decrease in non purchase loans. These numbers appear to be pretty similar to the numbers that have occurred the last 4 months as well. The numbers certainly aren't what they were earlier in the year, but they seem to be stabilizing and probably prepared to go up in the not too distant future. Lompoc in December was the only area where both the non purchase loans and the purchase loans went up slightly. Again, I don't think this is anything to revealing other than the numbers seem to be stabilizing and to me that might mean we are close or at the bottom of the market when it comes to the number of transactions that are being done. See You In Escrow!