Within the gates of the exclusive Los Lagos development in Granite Bay, home to business executives and real estate magnates, the postman delivers almost one fresh home loan default notice a month.

Mortgage defaults are not just a problem of the poor. Sacramento's wealthiest residents are defaulting on their recent home loans at least as often as everyone else – and in some posh enclaves, more, according to a Bee analysis of federal mortgage data and figures from Foreclosures.com.

Banks have filed about 550 default notices on local home loans of more than $1 million since 2007. The total value of those loans is roughly $750 million.

Estates on the west side of Folsom Lake form the epicenter of the trend. In this strip of Placer County, banks have filed four default notices for every 10 home loans of more than $1 million issued during 2006 and 2007.

"Everyone always has delusions of grandeur. At some point you have to accept this is what it is," said Folsom resident James Caramazza, who took a hit on his $1.4 million loan following a short sale.

One difference between the poor and the rich: Fewer expensive homes are actually going back to lenders. Instead, short sales abound; currently, there are 95 short sales priced over $600,000 in the region, according to MetroList MLS.

Banks are more likely to approve short sales on big loans because so much cash is at stake; because it's expensive to maintain a mansion; and because wealthy homeowners often have enough money to hire a real estate lawyer to negotiate, several local real estate experts said.

Recent short sale attempts following mortgage defaults include radio personality Tom Sullivan and former Kings basketball stars Kevin Martin and Ron Artest. Martin and Artest could have covered their loans with a portion of their annual, multimillion salaries – a fact that angered some local residents.

"It's not fair and it's not right," said Madelyne Moreno, a Rio Linda resident struggling to get her bank to approve a short sale on a more modest loan. "They can turn around and get another home immediately."

But a lot of the region's largest defaults aren't strategic "walkaways." The recession has hit the wealthy hard, too, and many couldn't afford to keep making payments on their big houses.

The number of local households earning more than $1 million annually fell 20 percent from pre-recession 2006 to midrecession 2008, from 1,434 to 1,135, according to the latest figures from the Franchise Tax Board.

The housing market was largely behind the earlier wealth influx, and its transitory nature.

Many newly flush real estate developers and brokers bought huge homes in the boom and quickly lost them in the bust – like winning a cake in a raffle and then falling into it face first.

'I thought I was real smart'

Brand owned his $3 million home in South Lake Tahoe free and clear in 2005 when he decided to take out nearly $1.7 million to invest.

"I thought I was real smart," Brand said.

Those investments tanked and Brand could no longer afford his loan payments.

So he enlisted a colleague in his office to work on a short sale, eventually reaching a bank vice president who approved a deal. The home sold for $1.4 million in April. Since then, Brand has managed to buy another home for $700,000 from someone he knew who helped with the financing.

Caramazza, whose family owned a development company felled by the market collapse, never even got to live in his swank Granite Bay home.

He and his wife took out a $1.4 million construction loan from Countrywide in May 2007 to build a house on 2.3 acres of land on Bella Terra Place in Granite Bay.

When the economy went south, Caramazza tried to sell his home in Folsom and move into the Granite Bay home.

The Folsom home, however, just sat on the market. So Caramazza tried to sell the Granite Bay home. He got some nibbles, but eventually dropped the price from $1.99 million to $1.59 million to $1.49 million.

Finally, he turned to a short sale and unloaded the Granite Bay home for $900,000, losing some equity. He also later sold his Folsom home and bought a smaller, 2,300-square-foot home, also in Folsom.

Caramazza and Brand are two of the dozens of real estate and investment professionals to default on large mortgage loans in the past few years, The Bee review found. The list is dotted with real estate agents, brokers, investment advisers, bankers and some high-profile developers.

Fewer houses priced in millions

In 2006 and 2007, banks approved about 1,400 home loans of $1 million or more in the four-county area, according to federal loan data. Since then, they've filed about 415 default notices on those loans, according to a Bee survey of listings from Foreclosures.com.

That's three default notices for every 10 big loans during that period, about even with the default rate for the rest of the region.

Today, with the market still depressed, there are far fewer houses selling for millions. Banks approved fewer than 150 home loans of $1 million or greater during 2009, an 80 percent drop from 2007.

Contributing to the malaise: tighter rules by lenders.

"You have to come up with a 30 to 35 percent down payment" to take out a jumbo loan, said Nick Sadek, a local real estate broker who specializes in high-end sales.

Sadek and others say homes that once sold for more than $1 million locally are now selling for at least 40 percent less. A large proportion of buyers these days, Sadek said, work in medicine, one of the few sectors still growing.

There's disagreement among real estate experts about how the sale of distressed mansions affects people trying to sell modest homes. Some called expensive homes a niche that operates in its own space. But Patrick Hake, a Placer County Remax Gold broker who sells a broad mix of homes, said everything's connected.

"If you have a home that used to be $1.5 million selling for $800,000, another home that used to be $800,000 will go for something less," Hake said.

Whatever its impact and causes, the million-dollar-home crash is likely not over. During 2010, banks issued about three default notices on $1 million home loans each week, a trend that continued through December.

Warren Adams, a real estate broker who specializes in foreclosures, thinks banks are holding a "shadow inventory" of high-end homes because they don't want to flood the market.

"I've been surprised that I have not seen more of the high-end stuff," he said. "The banks are sitting on them. I keep saying that is going to be our next wave."

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