Greg Knowles Santa Barbara Ca.

I started in the title business 28 years ago. Those were the good old days. I began in customer service for Safeco Title Co. and delivered all kinds of documents and reports. One of those reports was called a property profile.

The property profile in those days included a copy of the tax roll and a grant deed and maybe a printout of some sales comparables for the area. All of these were printed from microfiche and certainly took time to put together.

Over the years these property profiles have grown to include;

• neighborhood information
• demographics
• copies of open trust deeds
• sales comps and maps that locate those comps
• plat maps
• aerial maps

Yesterday was a huge announcement in my world. The department of insurance issued an opinion almost all of these tools we have been supplying we are now no longer allowed to provide.

The only item our compliance people are letting us supply now is the tax roll information. This seems crazy to me, 28 years ago when I first got in to this business I was able to provide more than that. In order to get any of these documents in the future someone has to actually be in an escrow with us.

So a realtor can not ask us for a copy of a grant deed before going on a listing appointment to make sure they are meeting with the correct parties. We can no longer send someone a copy of a notice of default or a copy of a trust deed which have always been used to help the consumer.

We are being told that our customers only option is to sign up for a service that will cause them to pay for these documents. I worry about these services having the necessary expertise to deliver the correct documents. After all it takes our people years of training to find these documents before making copies of them. I am truly concerned that this could be a real problem for consumers. 

My thoughts and concerns don't matter though!

The last 24 hours has been filled with delivering this message to our many customers. They have all been great and didn't take any shots at the messenger (me).

Many customers had one question I honestly don't have a real good answer for. That question is why can't you give us copies of deeds or maps? These are some of the very basic tools that we have readily available.

Maybe one of you reading this has an answer. I would love to hear it.  

For those of you in California I would also love to hear what your title company representatives are telling you.

In looking over the numbers reported by the County for Notices of Defaults, Notice of Trustees Sale, and Trustees Deeds for March, there are some real concerns.

The number of Notices of Defaults that were recorded rose significantly and is a record number. There were 414 recorded in March. This is my biggest concern since it is a leading indicator of things to come.

The number of Notice of Trustees Sale documents that were recorded was 203. This is the highest number dating back to August of 2008 which was 276. I can only think that the banks will again be receiving a number of properties back soon.

March's Trustees Deeds that were recorded totalled 86. That number is actually a bit lower than previous months. This of course would be the last number affected by the foreclosure process and I would expect it to rise.

In looking at these numbers, the number of notices of defaults rising sharply could certainly be a sign of more foreclosures to come. Some people that I have spoken to are wondering if people are allowing their properties to go in to foreclosure so they can take advantage of the benefits of modifying their loan.

Time will tell if this increase in the number of notices of defaults is going to impact the number of bank owned properties in the upcoming months. I do think it is a little bit of wishful thinking to think that people are going in to foreclosure to take advantage of getting their loan modified, but it could be part of the equation.

I do the best I can to keep up on all the real estate news and many of the headlines these days are about refinancing. Check out these recent articles.

Market Watch Applications filed to refinance an existing mortgage rose an unadjusted 41.5% last week, compared with the week before.

U S News & World Report The Mortgage Bankers Association on Tuesday jacked up its 2009 forecast for mortgage originations to reflect the Fed's recent moves to engineer lower mortgage rates. The group now expects mortgage originations to total $2.78 trillion this year

Market Watch 30 Year Mortgage Rate at 4.85%

Having the mortgage industry get busy again will help our economy in many ways.

• Freeing up some personal spending
• Cooling people's financial anxiety
• Stimulating some income for folks in the lending world

My biggest concern is, are the lenders ready for it?

In the last few years this industry has seen it's workforce shrink significantly. This happened in the form of layoffs and of course the closing of many mortgage lenders. So handling the increase in business will be tough for the present staff to accomplish. I know this to be true in Santa Barbara.

The other piece of the puzzle is even though applications are up, will this reflect in actual closings being up as significantly? Borrowers are having a harder time qualifying and of course properties may not be worth what borrowers are expecting them to be worth.

The bottom line to me though is if you can borrow now and need to borrow now GO FOR IT!

January was very slow with respects to home sales in the Santa Barbara, Goleta, Carpinteria and Montecito areas. Maybe even a record low. That is the lowest number I can remember, and I've been around since the mid 80's. The map below shows the sales that did occur. Feel free to check out your favorite neighborhood. This would lead me to believe the bottom is here!

There are certainly many records being set in the financial world these days. Real Estate is no different. The number of Santa Barbara area homes sold in November is another all time low as far as I know. I did have my hopes up that the last quarter of this year would see more sales than last year.

Two months in to the last quarter of the year and the Santa Barbara Real Estate Sales are 3 transactions behind where they were last year. Come on December! In 2007 there were 93 transactions in December. After seeing what we opened as a company in November it is going to be close. We have a number of transactions that are wanting to close by the end of the year, so there may be a small surge.

So what did sell in November of 2008? The highest priced sale was a property in the Carpinteria, Montecito area at 915 Cima Del Mundo for $6,500,000. That has become a pretty hot area for the well to do recently. Other than that Montecito had the usual 2, 3, & 4 million dollar sales.

The rest of the South County saw pretty normal sales prices and nothing really out of the ordinary for this market. Santa Barbara, Montecito, & Carpinteria all had fewer homes sell this year than last. Goleta was the one area that saw a small increase in home sales over last year.

Check out your favorite area on the map below.