Zoom-Baah, the Magic Bus

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This from:
Steve Yeater / Los Angeles Times

A STOP ON THE TOUR: Real estate agent Cesar Dias’ Repo Home Tour buses take prospective buyers to foreclosed homes they might want to scoop up. One real estate data firm has pegged Stockton as the U.S. city with the highest rate of foreclosure filings.
STOCKTON - In this city that traces its roots to California's Gold Rush, real estate agent Cesar Dias believes there are fortunes still to be made.

That's why he leads the weekly Repo Home Tour, filling two 18-seat buses with prospective buyers eager to view foreclosed houses that can be snapped up at - what he says - are bargain prices.

Dias, a Stockton native, said that when he started the free tour in September, some residents criticized it as a tasteless marketing gimmick. But as headlines announce record foreclosures and weeds sprout in the yards of abandoned homes, their tune has changed.

"We're bringing in homeowners to get the grass green again," he said.

As the brightly colored buses recently rolled through a subdivision dotted with "For sale" signs, a couple who were stringing up Christmas lights waved. The bargain hunters aboard waved back. Dias, who said his business was booming, offered a friendly beep.

"At this point, I wish the foreclosures would dry up. We could use an end to the free fall," Dias said, adding that the rate-freeze plan President Bush recently announced would help, even if it reached only a fraction of struggling homeowners.

Dias' home tour is just one more high-profile sign of the mortgage crisis that has hit the Stockton area particularly hard. RealtyTrac, a real estate data firm, has pegged Stockton as the U.S. city with the highest rate of foreclosure filings, edging out even such troubled metropolitan areas as Detroit.

Other experts question the significance of such conclusions, pointing out that the company counts delinquency notices for late payments as well as actual foreclosures. Even so, nobody doubts that Stockton and the rest of the Central Valley have been severely jolted. By October, foreclosures in Stockton's San Joaquin County were more than eight times last year's levels, outpacing the state's increase by 41 percent, according to DataQuick, a La Jolla-based information service.

At the waterfront Stockton Arena on Dec. 1, about 500 anxious residents lined up at a foreclosure workshop to see loan counselors from government agencies and nonprofits. Clutching bank documents, they wanted to know how to short-circuit the foreclosures they saw looming, how to negotiate for freezes in their adjustable interest rates, how to buy some time.

Some recounted loan officers having urged them to inflate their incomes to qualify for bigger loans. Others said they had snagged 100-percent loans but had unwittingly agreed to double-digit interest rates and pre-payment penalties as high as $10,000.

Pete Ponce de Leon, a 50-year-old machinist, said he and his wife were barely keeping up with their monthly mortgage payments, which shot up from $1,700 a year ago to $2,500 now. He said he cashed in two IRAs, sold his tools, sold a truck and was bracing for another rate increase this month. Along the way, he lost his job, and his lender refused to cut him a break.

"Why don't they just screw us all at once instead of a little at a time?" said Ponce de Leon, who has found another job and hopes to renegotiate his mortgage.

Like homes almost everywhere else in California, the Ponce de Leons' lost value and their interest rate kept going up.

As more homes entered foreclosure, more neighborhoods were riddled with problem properties - some in disrepair because of their owners' financial problems, a few boarded up to deter squatters.

Median home prices in the county tumbled from a high of $425,000 in July 2006 to $319,000 in October. Last summer, San Joaquin County officials sent out crews to dump chemicals and larvae-eating fish into the stagnant water of abandoned swimming pools, where mosquitoes were breeding.

"The mortgage crisis was, in a way, becoming a public health crisis," said Rep. Dennis Cardoza, D-Merced, who co-sponsored the foreclosure workshop. "It's one more symptom of a sick situation."

In some ways, the Stockton area's mortgage crisis has played out much like that in Southern California's "Inland Empire." In both places, commuters from big metropolitan areas were finding homes they could afford - if barely - in vast, recently built tracts that could be more than a two-hour drive from their jobs. Little wonder: Although San Joaquin County home prices in recent years soared from the 2000 median of $133,000, they still drew thousands of people squeezed out of the Bay Area, where a median-priced home now goes for more than $810,000, according to the California Association of Realtors.