I have a bankruptcy law satellite office in Woodland Hills, CA. It used to be the case that debtors in the Antelope Valley filed bankruptcy in the Woodland Hills Bankruptcy Court. This is not the case any longer as residents of the Antelope Valley now file bankruptcy downtown. Anyway, I thought it would be instructive to survey the foreclosure landscape in Woodland Hills in a similar fashion as I had done for Palmdale Foreclosures and Lancaster Foreclosures.
The Woodland Hills foreclosure trend year-over-year is pretty flat from the standpoint of Notices of Default. Notices of Default are only down 5.26%. On the other hand, Notices of Sale are off 25.00% in the same time period. Compared to Lancaster or Palmdale who experienced significant decreases in Notices of Default the modest 5.26% is a pretty modest. I think it would be fair to say that things never got quite as bad in Woodland Hills even at the height of the recession and the housing bubble burst so this might help explain the discrepancy.
By the way, Foreclosure Radar is great service which provides incredibly detailed data on foreclosures pretty much anywhere you could imagine and I have them to thank for all these neat graphs.
Foreclosures in Lancaster, CA in a similar fashion to foreclosures in Palmdale and other areas of the Antelope Valley are trending downward. Lancaster as you might know is the home of my main law office where I specialize in bankruptcy practice even while I have expanded to other areas of the law.
Notices of Default are down 15.96% (213 to 179) from the prior month and 26.34% from the prior year (243 to 179). Bucking the downward trend, Notices of Sale were UP for the month of April (182 to 193), but over the course of the last 12 months are down 35.45% from the prior year (299 to 193).
Unlike Palmdale, where the Time to Foreclose was significantly higher, the Time to Foreclose in Lancaster was relatively flat. In the prior 12 months, the Time to Foreclose was up, but only slightly by 7.94% or 277 days in April 2010 compared to 299 days in April 2011.
Again, the inescapable impression is things are getting better, but this does not diminish the pain that is still all too prevalent in our community in Lancaster. Interestingly, Palmdale seems to have improved a little more than Lancaster in comparison to my Palmdale Foreclosures post, but improvement is improvement. I know I am still hard at work as a bankruptcy attorney representing the interest of many debtors in Lancaster and throughout the Antelope Valley.