Even as home sales slow and prices fall, optimistic San Diego and Riverside county homebuilders are opening more new communities than they have in the last two years, builders and analysts said.

The North San Diego County and Southwest Riverside County housing markets are glutted with bank-owned houses and short sales, which put a drag on local house prices. And sales of new houses, which tend to be more expensive, have dropped below 2010 levels.

Yet builders opened 18 new communities in San Diego County in the first three months of 2011, five more than in the same period of 2010, and 16 opened in Riverside County, six more than during the same period last year, according to MarketPointe Realty Advisers.

Builders spent 2010 snapping up cheap land from banks or from developers desperate to sell. Lower land prices translate to lower housing costs for buyers, especially with a bevy of energy- and water-efficiency improvements many builders now include on their models.

Full story is available on iStockAnalyst

The biggest discounts were in Ohio and Illinois, where foreclosed homes sold at an average discount of 41% from regular prices. The discount was 39% in Kentucky and Maryland, 38% in Tennessee, 37% in Wisconsin, and 36% in Delaware, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Louisiana.

In what may seem a contrary statistic, none of the 10 states where the discounts are biggest are among the states with the highest percentage of foreclosed properties on the market. In those states, the discounts are well below the U.S. average of 27%. In two states, Utah and Montana, homes in foreclosure sold for more than the average price of non-distressed properties.

Full story is available on Huliq

If you think there’s no competition in this sluggish real estate market, think again.

A survey released Thursday by online real-estate firm Move Inc. suggests housing markets around the country are heating up with more activity from investors. The survey of 1,000 investors found that they will be more active than typical homebuyers by 3:1. More than half think prices will stay about the same over the next six months to a year, but 22% said prices will rise. And 23% said prices will fall.

For the traditional homebuyer, the flood of investors represents robust competition. Why will investors usually win out? Two-thirds surveyed say first-time home buyers’ struggles to secure a mortgage actually helps investors; investors can often pay cash and command deep discounts for doing so.

Full story is available on The Wall Street Journal

The housing market is dropping and “about to go to a new low,” Jeffrey Gundlach, chief executive of the fixed-income investment management firm DoubleLine Capital told CNBC Tuesday.

“I kind of think we’re looking at some type of echo in the credit crisis coming up here. That’s what I’m sort of afraid of,” said Gundlach, whose firm has almost $11.2 billion in assets under management.

“The housing market is dropping. It depends what indicator you look at. Case-Shiller [S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices] kind of lags but it’s about to go to a new low. It’s one basis point off the low that was hit a couple of years ago,” he added.

Back in 2007 the ABX Index, an index referencing a basket of 20 subprime mortgage-backed securities, was heavily traded, Gundlach explained. “It was a real-time index, but what people aren’t noticing is its dropped about 20 percent in value in the past few months, and most of that decline has happened in the last three months.”

Full story is available on CNBC

Most Americans don’t expect the housing market to recover until 2014 at the earliest, according to a survey released this week by property websites Trulia and RealtyTrac.

That sounds bad news for Trulia itself, except the six-year-old company has already survived the crash, is now profitable and getting itself in shape for an IPO.

At a media briefing at its new 30,000 square-foot offices in San Francisco, the management team described how revenues were doubling year-on-year and it had finally turned profitable in the second half of last year. Staff numbers have climbed to 280, up from 170 at the end of 2010.

Pete Flint, chief executive, explained Trulia had to change its model from servicing a few million-dollar accounts with big banks in the early days to addressing the needs of real estate agents across the US.

Full storu is available on FT.com

If you get a thumbs down from your lender after waiting on a loan modification reason not explained, you may be facing the fact that foreclosure could be just around the corner and you’re confused and desperate. You are most interested in finding if there are foreclosure alternatives out there that could work for you.

There are so many questions and hoops to jump through when attempting to secure a loan modification. The lender has rules and the borrow must abide by those loan modification rules or the loan won’t work. The borrower is asking a lot of any lender offering a loan modification, including reduced charges and a lower interest rate, to name a few of the benefits. Perhaps that is why a loan modification presents a great opportunity for a borrower to stay in his or her home with new loan conditions; it also can take time.

Full story is available on benzinga.com

There’s a three-year inventory of homes in foreclosure for sale, and that’s devastating home prices.

Las Vegas has so many foreclosures that 53 percent of all the homes sold in Nevada are in some stage of foreclosure, according to a report from RealtyTrac, the online marketer of foreclosed properties.

Foreclosures represent 45 percent of sales in California and Arizona, and 28 percent of all existing home sales during the first three months of 2011.

“This is very bad for the economy,” said Rick Sharga, a spokesman for RealtyTrac.

What’s more, the homes are selling at steep discounts, especially so-called REOs, bank-owned homes that have been taken in foreclosure procedures.

Full story is available on Chicago Tribune

Pity the poor Nevada homeowner. With home prices tumbling there at perhaps the fastest rate in the nation, it has become nearly impossible to get a handle on how much a home is worth. Why? Because appraisers, who base home values on comparable sales, have to depend on the plummeting target of “distressed” property sales that dominate in the state.

Nevada state Sen. Mike Schneider is trying to fight back with proposed legislation that aims to set a floor under prices, which have fallen well over 50 percent on average in the Las Vegas area over the past five years. A few months ago, he sponsored a bill proposing a radical new mandate for appraisers: Stop paying attention to those “distressed” sales. Legislators in other states and industry executives are watching closely.

Full story is available on msn.com

In the last five years, about six and a half million homes were lost in the United States due to foreclosures. New information from the Mortgage Bankers Association indicates that another 4.3 million more homeowners are seriously delinquent on their mortgages. This is a huge number of homes, many of which will eventually be put on the market at reduced rates will continue to weigh on housing prices for some time to come.

At the end of 2011, CoreLogic estimated that 11.1 million homes with mortgages were underwater (owed more on their mortgage than they were worth). This accounts for 23.1 percent of residential homeowners with mortgages. Total negative equity is $750 billion, or about $68,000 per home on average. These underwater homeowners are far more likely to become delinquent or go into foreclosure than those who have home equity (assuming they are not already delinquent or in foreclosure).

Full story is available on Total Mortgage Services

Home foreclosures have skyrocketed since the financial crisis of 2007.

And experts say now, more people than ever are stepping up and buying those houses.

So could a foreclosure be your next dream home?

CBS 2’s Christine Sloan takes a look at what to do and what not to do.

A quaint house in the exclusive Sleepy Hollow section of Plainfield is a bank-approved short sale — going for $288,000, nearly $130,000 less than what the previous mortgage balance was from the previous owner.

The former owner of the home, which has a posh, updated bathroom, was offered an incentive to leave it in mint condition.

It’s great deal for buyers.

Full story is available on CBS New York