Surging foreclosure rate drives latest sales tactic

San Diego Foreclosure & Real Estate News

 SAN DIEGO – All aboard the REPO Express, a new kind of bus tour that takes riders on a guided search for bargains within San Diego County's surging home foreclosure market.

Coshow Real Estate Group in Hillcrest launched the tour yesterday as it shuttled about 20 clients to condominiums in East Village, Hillcrest, Little Italy, Cortez Hill, Bankers Hill and the Gaslamp Quarter.

The goal was to showcase some of the best deals among thousands of homes that have been repossessed by lenders.

Large inventories of these real-estate-owned properties have made lenders increasingly willing to negotiate. Several condos on yesterday's tour had been marked down tens of thousands of dollars below original asking prices and comparable resale listings provided by Coshow.

Leading the free tour were real estate broker Carla Coshow and agent Dan Webb. Among the repo tourists who crowded into the small bus was Beatrice Doblado of Fletcher Hills. Doblado, 68, said she last purchased foreclosed homes during the housing slump of the mid-1990s “and it has paid royally.”

“This time I am looking for something small that I can retire and move into,” she said.

Sitting a few rows back were Yogesh Bhakta, a 34-year-old pharmacist, and his wife, Anita. The couple are renting a condo in the Hillcrest area but want a home of their own.

“We're hoping to find a fantastic deal like everyone else, something that's below market value that we would be happy to reside in,” Bhakta said.

Lorrie Webb, a 50-year-old general contractor from La Jolla, said she was looking for a fixer-upper. “I buy very tired properties,” she said. “I like to give them soul.”

As the bus pulled up to various condominium buildings, participants were quickly ushered inside for a visit, then hustled back onto the bus. The tour of eight condominium complexes lasted a little less than three hours.

At the upper end of the price range was a tony two-bedroom unit at The Renaissance with an asking price of $605,900. The downtown condo had been listed for $649,900.

At the low end was a one-bedroom fixer-upper in dire need of a new carpet at the Acqua Vista at 425 Beech Street. The asking price was $205,900 for the new listing.

At least one other local entrepreneur besides Coshow has gone into the foreclosure tourism business. For several weeks, the Home Repo Tour in Chula Vista has been conducting excursions to foreclosed homes. It's a spinoff of another foreclosure tour in Stockton, spokesman Nick Dias said.

Rising defaults are affecting neighborhoods throughout the region.

Maria Bernacett, a teacher's aide who owns a condo in National City, said she and her neighbors were recently shocked to see a repo-tour bus drive down their street.

“It was scary,” she said. “Our jaws just dropped. I thought, 'What is this coming to?' ”

After falling sharply in November, San Diego County's home foreclosure rate shot up in December as the number of defaults in 2007 set an annual record.

According to DataQuick Information Systems, the county's notices of default – the start of the foreclosure process – rose 128 percent to 20,138 in 2007. Foreclosures rose 353 percent to 7,349 during 2007. Both figures set records since DataQuick began keeping track ofcounty foreclosures in 1988 and defaults in 1992.

The ZIP code with the most foreclosures in 2007 was 91913, Chula Vista-East Lake-Otay Ranch, DataQuick reported. It had 301 foreclosures last year, compared with 55 in 2006. Other ZIP codes with more than 250 foreclosures were Spring Valley 91977, Oceanside North 92057, Nestor 92154 and Chula Vista South 91911.

At the end of Saturday's REPO Express tour, no one had made an offer on a home, but several people had expressed an interest, Webb said. Coshow plans to continue tours on Saturdays and Sundays “as long as there is demand.”

More information about the REPO Express Foreclosed Home Tour is available online at repoexpresstour.com. Details about Chula Vista-based Home Repo Tour can be found online at homerepotour.com.