From the Record:

In North Jersey foreclosures are up, home sales down

In a painful sign of the worsening real estate downturn, foreclosure actions in North Jersey nearly tripled in the first five months of 2008 over the same period in 2007, an analysis by The Record has found.

At the same time, the volume of housing sales has plummeted this year. And North Jersey home values, which held steady while many of the nation’s housing markets steeply declined in the last two years, have begun to crack.

Median home prices declined 2.3 percent in Bergen County and 8.2 percent in Passaic County in the first half of this year, compared with the same period in 2007, according to a Record analysis of public property records.

“If you bought your house less than five years ago, you’ve seen a decline in the price,” said Crystal Burns, an agent with Re/Max Advantage Plus in Teaneck.

Still, the region’s housing prices have held up better than the nation’s, where average prices have declined more than 15 percent, according to the Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index of 20 metropolitan areas.

But the rising foreclosure numbers are a sign of trouble. About 2,800 North Jersey residential properties — roughly one out of every 135 — were in some stage of the foreclosure process from January to May 2008, compared with about 1,000 — or one in 385 — a year earlier, according to The Record’s analysis of data from RealtyTrac, a California company that follows the market. Those numbers range from initial notices that a homeowner is in default on mortgage payments to a sheriff’s auction of the house to satisfy the debt.

And 335 actually lost their homes to foreclosure in the first five months of this year, a seven-fold jump from the January-May 2007 period. Most of those properties went back to the lenders.
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Social service agencies are being flooded with calls from homeowners in distress.

“Some people we can help, because there are some lenders that will negotiate,” said Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, head of NJ Citizen Action, which does housing counseling.

“But about half of the people who come in here can’t be helped,” she continued. “They don’t have the money to pay the current loan. They don’t have enough equity to refinance. And they don’t have a lender who’s agreeing to negotiate. Those people are eventually going to get foreclosed on.”
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“We haven’t even hit the worst part of the problem,” said Salowe-Kaye.
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Lisa Molnar of Skylands Appraisals in Ringwood said prospective buyers “are just terrified. They think, ‘Why would I buy a house if values are going to decline?”