The El Dorado Hills real estate market, a subsidiary of the larger Sacramento real estate metropolitan area housing market, saw a few discouraging signs in the most recent tracking period, including a dearth of new homes being sold in September, August, and July. The recent controversy over foreclosures has also added more uncertainty to an already unstable market. According to an October 18, 2010 report from the Sacramento Business Journal, “Homebuilders sold a record-low 288 homes in the six-county Sacramento region during the three months that ended Sept. 30, another indication that the new-home market won’t bounce back this year despite initial hopes to the contrary. Builders had been scooping up finished lots earlier in the year, but those lots appear to be sitting unused as buyers lost interest after tax credits designed to spur home sales expired. “This is no shock to anyone,” said Greg Paquin, founder of The Gregory Group, which released the report today.”
The controversial practices of several national lenders have resulted in considerable uncertainty for El Dorado Hills homes for sale as well as regional homeowners. According to an October 21, 2010 article in the Sacramento Bee, “The foreclosure mess that's roiling the real estate market from coast to coast is causing plenty of uncertainty here in Sacramento. Those who've lost a home to foreclosure wonder if they'll get their house back. Sellers are in limbo. Ditto would-be buyers. And those who've recently bought a foreclosed property now worry whether their purchase was properly documented. "There's a lot of confusion about what this means," said Pam Canada, CEO of the nonprofit NeighborWorks Homeownership Center in Sacramento, which gets dozens of calls daily from folks in various stages of foreclosure. So what does it mean? Despite disclosures of sloppy documentation by nationwide lenders handling foreclosures, the situation is largely a "paper shuffle" that's not going to change things for struggling homeowners, Canada said…All the uncertainty stems from allegations that banks and mortgage servicers including Bank of America, GMAC, JP Morgan Chase and others were improperly rubber-stamping untold thousands of foreclosure documents…The impact has rippled throughout the real estate foreclosure community nationally and in California.”