Home Front

After years of falling values and a massive sell-off of foreclosed homes in the Sacramento region, it's easier now to believe real estate agents when they say the market has bottomed out.

Sacramento-area home builders just keep singing the blues.

Where do today's real estate agents go when they go online?

The pros say buyers should commit soon if they want to get that federal $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit.

The annual real estate forecast season opened this week with an estimate that the end of 2009 won't be much better than the beginning, and capital home builders will sell just 3,400 new houses, condos and town houses this year.

It's anniversary time for two of the biggest housing developments the Sacramento region has ever seen – Sun City Lincoln Hills and Sun City Roseville.

Michael Choe made two very good calls in this crazed real estate market. He sold high in 2004 and bought low in 2008. As the crash continues, Choe's is the ultimate wish-we-had-done-that tale.

There once was a time in Sacramento when well-educated people had two good jobs per household, a safe fixed-rate mortgage, and easy assurances that the mortgage crisis was someone else's problem.

The K. Hovnanian-built house in Natomas has a standard-size bedroom and a surprisingly large great room that combines a kitchen and living room. But that's about it for 817 square feet – likely the smallest new house for sale in Sacramento. Price: $126,000.

Laurel Bane, 28, is a working professional with a down payment in hand. Hunting for her first home in Natomas, she's made six offers since March. And she's lost every house.

As attempted short sales proliferate across the capital region, many people are worried about bad things that might happen to them – even if they succeed in selling.

In the aftermath of the Sacramento region's housing boom it's abundantly clear now that keeping a lid on housing growth can pay off for cities and their inhabitants' home values over the long run.

Compared with the rest of the anemic new-home sales market, Roseville looks robust.

This week the Sacramento County Assessor's Office – and more like it across the great foreclosure belts of California – chopped property values again on nearly everything built in the housing boom.

Last Friday's Home Front item about Sacramento Realtor Donald Stitt finding so many abandoned pets these days in repossessed homes drew a barrage of reader criticism for not explaining what people should do when they find animals left behind.

Day in and day out since 2007, callers who struggle with mortgages throughout the Sacramento region, those who can't sleep for worrying, who want to stay with houses that have lost $150,000 in value, have phoned Home Front to fret and express a common sentiment.

New numbers released this week by the California Department of Corporations show the mortgage crisis is moving higher up the food chain.

Mortgage rates, rising quickly from near-historic lows earlier this year, are already having negative consequences in the capital region.

Painful as it is, all this housing distress has one advantage, says Joel Singer, executive vice president of the California Association of Realtors.

Europeans are making Sacramento a regular stop on media expeditions to the housing crisis that has been pounding their banks.

For all the pain and trouble associated with this housing bust, one thing is clear: It's getting better and better for first-time buyers.

California's 400-mile Central Valley and its largest metro area, Sacramento, are almost perfect poster children for housing boom excesses that doubled home values, then quickly shredded them in a torrent of foreclosures.

Somewhere in every human being resides the fantasy to own a huge, expensive showcase house – and big-time charities are pouncing all over it.

Struggling homeowners looking for help with mortgages might try a new online tool launched by Minneapolis credit scoring icon Fair Isaac Corp., better known as FICO.