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

One in four new houses sold in the capital region in April, May and June were in the Placer County city of 112,000, according to building industry statistics being released today by the Folsom-based Gregory Group.

For the past two decades, Roseville has been a powerhouse in the suburban Sacramento housing and jobs market. Analysts predict it may be one of the first areas of the region to emerge from the real estate slump.

According to the Gregory Group report, 26.2 percent – or 255 – of the new houses sold regionwide in the second quarter were in Roseville, primarily in the recently annexed west Roseville growth area.

"The price points have come down quite a bit, and there's a fair amount of affordable product in Roseville by now," said Gregory Group President Greg Paquin. "Plus, it's a very desirable place to be. When people ask us what area is going to rebound first, we invariably say it's Placer County."

Roseville's dominance has remained a trend through most of the housing bust. Since 2007 ushered in a sales twilight of once-soaring Lincoln and Elk Grove, Roseville has outpaced other area cities for new-home sales, accounting for about one in five.

"When prices fell, we were seeing first-time buyers and folks who can live closer to work come into Roseville and buy a house," said Julia Burrows, Roseville's deputy city manager and head of economic development.

That helps explain why the Placer County city posted a 2.7 percent growth rate from January 2008 to January 2009, one of the highest in California, even as the wheels fell off the economy. Lincoln was scaled back to 1.9 percent growth; Elk Grove, to 1.7 percent, the state Department of Finance reported.

"A lot of my friends live in Roseville," explained one April buyer, Andrew Bradley, a public relations manager who works in Sacramento. He said his house in west Roseville was affordable and close to his church and felt like "home" when he walked in the first time. He took advantage of incentives that included $18,000 worth of homebuyer tax credits, closing costs, and a free washer and dryer.

Bradley is one of those who helped whittle down the building industry's standing inventory. That supply of finished and almost-finished houses without buyers fell for a seventh straight quarter to 932 – the lowest since mid-2004.

Altogether, the Gregory Group reported 971 new-home sales in El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Sutter, Yolo and Yuba counties during the quarter. That's almost a 39 percent increase from 699 in the first quarter, and it brings the total for the first half of 2009 to 1,670. Last year's sales total: 4,695.

New-home prices averaged $376,679, rolling back to a mid-2003 level. In the second quarter of 2009, first-time buyers were more than 70 percent of the market.

Elk Grove has joined the list of cities in the region and across California that are trying to drum up business by trimming their home builder fees. Last week, the City Council agreed to cut road and capital facility fees by 30 percent.

In a statement, Mayor Patrick Hume called it a message that the city is "now, more than ever, open for business." (The Gregory Group counted 213 new-home sales in Elk Grove the first half of 2009 – less than half of 455 the same time last year).

Woodland trimmed some of its builder fees earlier this year. Talks continue now between home building industry representatives and development department officials in Sacramento County and the cities of Lincoln, Rancho Cordova and Folsom.

The cuts in Woodland and Elk Grove followed negotiations with builders who say fees once raised to boomtime highs no longer reflect the new reality of land values.

Capital-area real estate agents say they're seeing more parents bailing children out of real estate investments that have put them "under water."

Agents say it's increasingly common to see parents buy their children another house similar to the one they bought at the height of the market or too early as the market cooled.

In many of these cases, the house has lost up to $200,000 in value. So the parents' rescue mission moves their children into another house where lower payments are aligned with today's lower values.

Then the children do the best they can to unload the old house. That causes less damage to their credit than walking away.

Call The Bee's Jim Wasserman, (916) 321-1102. Read his blog on real estate, Home Front, at www.sacbee.com/blogs.