The New York Times weighed in on the subject today in an editorial saying another 55,000 American homes will have entered the foreclosure process by this Monday. That's when the U.S. Senate returns to work after leaving town last Friday without having passed a foreclosure prevention bill. The Times is among many increasingly worried about the larger economic implications of so many foreclosures.

Says The Times: "The foreclosure prevention bill is not a cure-all, by any means, but is a way to try to break the cycle."

I couldn't help but ask about the origin and purpose of those really loud jackets last week when Tom Kunz, president and CEO of Century 21 LLC., stopped by The Bee's offices for a conversation about the real estate market.

 Friday, we ran an abbreviated version of his response in the print edition Home Front. But the entire longer story was funny, interesting and quite business-like. This is, after all, earth's largest residential real estate firm. (FYI, this picture above is of Kunz on the left giving an award to a pair of Realtors from Australia. Hint, I think you can tell what firm they're with by those loud jackets).

 Here is CEO Kunz's entire answer.

"It's a marketing tool. That's all it really is. When Century 21 was founded in California in 1972 some of the competition in the marketplace was a company by the name of Red Carpet and they had a red coat. And so at the time it was kind of the thing to have.

"Our original colors were maroon and brown. It was something that set us apart and because we marketed it so well for so many years it still stands out. If you watch any TV show or a movie where they want to show a salesperson, a real estate salesperson without a for-sale sign or anything there, they usually call us and see if they can use our coat.

"For a number of years it went away, from about 1992 to about a year and a half ago. Yet it was still recognized as a professional real estate person. When I took the job (in 2004) and we started investigating: do we bring it back, it was one of those hard tasks you have to look at.

"From our agents' standpoint it was either they like it or they hate it. There's no gray area in between. The issue is it doesn't matter if you love it or you hate it. It's a marketing tool.

"When I walk through a neighborhood or get on a plane...I average one and a half to two leads a flight because I dress this way. When I get in because of of what's going on in the industry, when they seem me in this coat they know I work for Century 21 and they want to know: 'What's going on? Is it really going to hell in a handbasket. What's going on?'

It's our Nike swoosh," said Kunz.

(For the record I saw part of the the 1980s movie "War Games" over the weekend. Sure enough, Matthew Broderick's mom was a real estate agent and she wore a gold coat. And who can forget the goofy gold coat scenes in the Adam Sandler golf movie, "Happy Gilmore.)"

Image courtesy of Century 21 

Thursday June 26, 3:17 pm ET Bank of America plans to eliminate 7,500 jobs after Countrywide deal closes

The state Housing and Community Development Department released this statewide listing of awards this afternoon as well as a media release about getting the money on the street.

Perhaps you're wondering if the government is spending your money wisely. HCD provides this Web site to show where the money is going and what's left to allocate.

 New York, NY - The nation is in the throes of a housing downturn that is shaping up to be the worst in a generation, finds The State of the Nation's Housing report issued today by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.

While the falloff in housing starts, new home sales, and existing home sales already rivals the worst downturns in the post World War II era, home price declines and mortgage defaults are the worst on records that date back to the 1960s and 1970s.

"The slump in housing markets has not yet run its full course," concludes Nicolas P. Retsinas, the director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies. "Mortgage rates have barely responded to the aggressive easing of the Federal Reserve, the supply of for-sale vacant units continues to grow, and much tighter underwriting is locking many would-be homebuyers out of the market.

With home prices falling in most metropolitan areas, homeowners are tightening their belts, remodeling less, and staying on the sidelines."

From January through May, they're down 77.2 percent from the same time last year. The only regions close - both in the category of 70 plus percent drops - are our neighbors in Vallejo-Fairfield and Santa Rosa-Petaluma. Why? Foreclosures, a glut of unsold housing and high gas prices is a good guess.

The Sacramento region (El Dorado, Placer, Sacramento, Yolo counties) has a 48 percent drop, roughly about the state average.

Statewide, the BIA still predicts the fewest home starts for 2008 since it began keeping records in 1954.

 And Monday, Alan Nevin, chief economist for the Sacramento-based home builder trade group, said prospects for "major recovery" by year's end looks less likely.

He put out a bullish forecast in January, saying the market would start to pick up in the second half of 2008. He admitted then he was being contrary to a lot of more gloomier economists. Now he's scheduled a one-hour address Wednesday at the Pacific Coast Builders Conference in San Francisco. All bets are on eating crow and having to become a gloomier economist. It was a nice try, anyway.

Images: Eaglerealty.org, bp3.blogger.com

The deputy and five others spend much of their time posting eviction notices or ensuring that people are gone from apartments for not paying their rent. But now, rising numbers of foreclosures in the region have given them an extra duty: posting eviction notices and occasionally clearing squatters from houses repossessed by banks.

I will have the full story on this later in the week. Meanwhile, in the video below Deputy Habecker is posting an eviction notice at a two-story house on Bewicks Circle in Natomas. About a week from today he'll return, make sure no one is there and hand over the house to a representative of the bank.

Below is Deputy Habecker explaining how foreclosures have change his routine.