'Epicenter of the Boom...Epicenter of the Bust'

From CNN Money:

Mortgage delinquencies will continue to rise over the next six to 12 months as home prices decline and economic conditions remain difficult, according to one forecast released Monday. The Core Mortgage Risk Monitor (CMRM), an index of foreclosure risk compiled by real estate data analyzer First American CoreLogic, increased 16% compared with the same period last year.
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CoreLogic forecasts delinquency-risk to be worst in California's Inland Empire region, where home price appreciation has declined more than 21%. Elsewhere in the golden state, the Los Angeles and Sacramento areas are considered high risk for delinquencies.

From CBS 13:

[S]ome foreclosed homes are being damaged before they're even vacated. In 20 years of selling homes, agent Jon Nastro is now seeing more damage done by people with a personal attachment. Homeowners who have lost their homes...In about one out of every five foreclosures, Jon finds damage that's obviously not accidental. Cabinets ripped out, appliances stolen, people taking off with anything even if it is nailed down.

From the Stockton Record:

Apartment occupancy is up, and demand for rental units is up. That's usually a prime scenario for rising rents, but rents, at least for apartments in San Joaquin County, are flat, year to year...According to RealFacts, San Joaquin County apartment rents haven't increased at all from $881 in the first quarter of 2007 to last quarter.
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Terry Hull Sr., whose family owns and operates Property Management Experts in Stockton...said he's being very careful right now about holding rents steady. "My experience is you have to watch the unemployment rate," he said. "When people aren't working, you have a hard time raising rents."
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Hull said he expects the number of houses for rent to grow over the next year, as newly purchased foreclosures go onto the market as rentals. A year from now, when all the empty foreclosed houses the banks are currently holding wend their way to the rental market, there will be an oversupply of rental houses, he said. "If I had to guess, I would say 'Buyer beware,' " he said. "Right now, it's easy to rent out. In a year, I don't think it will be. It has the potential to be rugged if the economy stays in the tank."

From the Sacramento Bee:

In the first half of the decade, privately held Beutler rode the building boom to become the nation's largest new-home installer of heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems. With a full-time work force of 1,500, the company handled jobs from Bakersfield to San Jose to Chico. It controlled 60 percent of the Sacramento-area market and took in revenue of $212 million in 2005.

Then came the bust. For 2008, Wylie is hoping to do $65 million in business – an almost 70 percent drop from the peak. The company now employs just over 500 year-round workers. Last week, while some areas of the company's McClellan complex bustled, others were quiet. In several storage bays, hundreds of air-conditioning units sat stacked to the ceiling in boxes.

From the Sacramento Business Journal:

At a time when tighter credit is limiting the availability of financing, small businesses are finding it tougher to tap into a source of money that's targeted at them: U.S. Small Business Administration loans. For the start of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2007 through April 11, the SBA's 21-county Sacramento district reported both the number of SBA loans and their value is down from the same period a year earlier.
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SBA lending tends to be counter-cyclical: When the economy sours and business owners can't qualify for conventional loans, they seek government-backed SBA loans in greater numbers..."We're typically up, if not flat at worst, but now we're down. This is unusual," [National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders president Tony Wilkinson] said.
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[Director of the SBA's Sacramento district Jim] O'Neal attributes the decline to an industrywide tightening of credit standards, and "a lot of businesses are finding that this is not a time to expand, and they're consolidating their operations and aren't looking to take on more debt."

From the Modesto Bee:

With soaring gas prices and unemployment on the rise, labor experts say they are seeing a different type of labor pool emerge: one that's highly-qualified, competitive and willing to take a pay cut from what they were previously earning...Many of those job candidates have long résumés that include experience in the mortgage, title, construction or related industries.
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"In general, we're noticing that there's a lot more people in the market looking for work, especially people with experience in title and mortgage companies because of the layoffs in those industries," said Nahrin Jacobs, division director of OfficeTeam in Modesto, a division of Robert Half International. At the same time, many companies are tightening their belts to cope with the economic downturn and jobs have become increasingly scarce.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Economic news once mainly confined to The Bee's Business section is now consistently on the front page, and often in both places. Wall Street's problem has walked over to Main Street.
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Covering the story has been a challenge because its ever-expanding outlines only became apparent over time. Yet, in my opinion, the paper has done a good job of organizing itself to meet the challenge and in seeking out local impacts in great detail from the ground up. For example, business reporter Jim Wasserman early on focused on troubles in residential real estate, reporting on the broader negative trends then only becoming apparent. His stories were filled not only with experts and brokers and real estate agents, but also with real people. Some told tales of woe about foreclosures, others were giddy over their first chance to own a home.
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Sacramento's place before and after the slowdown, [Business editor Cathie] Anderson said, gave the story a special resonance. "We were the epicenter of the boom and now we're the epicenter of the bust," she said.