Foreclosures, Foreclosures, Foreclosures

Another weekend of housing woe in the pages of the Los Angeles Times:

Foreclosures may spur price drops —

Major lenders are repossessing homes in Southern California much faster than they can sell them, a development that could set off a downward spiral of price cuts and more foreclosures.

At some point -- maybe this fall, maybe in 2008 -- the lenders' inventories will grow so large that they will have no choice but to start aggressively cutting prices, many agents and analysts predict.

That, in turn, will put more pressure on individual sellers, who will have to reduce their own prices if they want to find a buyer.

As values fall, more people could lose their homes, which would swell the lenders' inventories anew.

"We're going to have a bear market in housing for a while," said Christopher Cagan, director of research for First American CoreLogic in Santa Ana. "It's going to be bad to be a seller or someone forced to refinance in the impact zone."

Foreclosures: How does your ZIP Code fare? — A searchable database that cointains foreclosure figures by Southern California ZIP Code for 2Q 2007.

One house's trip through the boom and bust —

Lenders have never been so careless with their loans, knowing they could easily resell them to Wall Street. With home values on the rise, houses took on a new role. They became ATMs where you never had to make a deposit but could withdraw endlessly, or so it seemed to many at the time.

MORTGAGE MELTDOWN: Housing woes afflict many —

The sub-prime mortgage pain convulsing financial markets is nothing new to people who make their livings in real estate and the housing construction industry. For months, the deteriorating market has been taking money out of millions of workers' pockets.

The real estate agent

The house appraiser

The mortgage loan processor

The mortgage brokers

The escrow owner

The tile setter

The painter

— TJ Sullivan in LA