SAN DIEGO — A woman was arrested in connection with an alleged housing scam centered in the South Bay, the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office announced Monday. 

The district attorney’s office said Dianne “Harmony” Brown illegally took over dozens of homes in Chula Vista, rented them out and turned a huge profit.

10News learned Brown was charged with 61 felony counts, which included burglary and drug charges as well as charges of filing false instruments.

Last month, Brown told 10News the company she and her husband operated, Prudent Constituents Association (PCA), was legitimate and above board.  However, investigators said Brown illegally rented out homes she did not own. Some realtors told 10News she was pocketing up to $60,000 a month as part of the alleged scam.

Some realtors said Brown used a loophole to fraudulently file quit claim deeds with the county that allowed PCA to gain the rights to various properties.

Brown insisted she was helping previous homeowners by using the rent money to fund lawsuits against banking institutions on their behalf.  “When the case gets settled that’s when PCA will split the award with the owners. If we can’t find the former owners, then the money will go into a trust with the state,” she told 10News in an interview in early January.

Brown’s husband, Dexter, was not arrested for his involvement with the company.

The Chula Vista Police Department and Chula Vista City Councilman Rudy Ramirez held a public meeting at Thurgood Marshall Elementary School and listened to concerned parents and realtors, who said squatters are terrorizing neighborhoods.

“They have showed me video of parties going on, urinating on their lawns, running across and peeking in the windows,” said realtor Terri Dillion. “These people… are invading areas of Chula Vista.”

Some at the meeting said police need to step up, while others blamed the banks. All said the system is flawed.  “I’m going to file a lawsuit against [Bank of America] if they don’t get off their fat corporate ass and go and stand up as property owners and get those people out,” said homeowner Bill Gersten.

Steve Lemack lives by the Browns. He said at the meeting that they are still operating and believes he and his family members are not safe.

“The rest of the group is still in the house,” he said. “I’ve been threatened. My family’s been threatened… verbally and in writing. They’ve come to my house and threatened my grandkids and they’re still out there… the rest of the group is still there. They told my grandkids, ‘Get out of the house for a couple of days.”

10News has a video here: http://www.10news.com/news/30393744/detail.html

You can see in this Carmel Valley graph that last year the list pricing never picked up any momentum during the prime spring selling season – the average list-price-per-sf was in a downward trend for the first three quarters of the year.  But there has been a surge over the last four months, though still well under all of 2010.

Also note that the buyers have stayed under control the last two years - the average sales price stuck right around Carmel Valley’s magical $330/sf , until recently:

Sales during the prime spring/summer selling season weren’t as successful either, staying well below those in 2010.  They tapered off early too – the late-summer plunge in sales looked like totals from winter months, even though inventory had been on the rise through June/July. 

But it appears that there must have been a lot of market-testers, because the inventory dropped steadily in the second half. 

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Here are the same two graphs for SE Carlsbad’s 92009 zip code, which is about the same size as Carmel Valley. 

This graph shows how committed buyers were to staying in the tight $240/sf-to-$250/sf range last year, as they watched sellers go nuts with their list-pricing during the spring kick.

Buyers were very patient, just picking off the good buys; and as the inventory of seller/dreamers thinned out heading into the holidays, so did sales:

What will it be this year? 

Buyers have waited this long, they aren’t going to pay a lot more than the last guy – maybe a little.  If so, they’d still be in line with 2010 pricing on these two graphs.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/02/housing-bottom-is-here.html

An excerpt:

For new home sales and housing starts, it appears the bottom is in, and I expect an increase in both starts and sales in 2012.

As the first graph shows, housing starts, both total and single family, bottomed in 2009 and have mostly moved sideways since then – with some distortions due to the ill-conceived housing tax credit.

New Home sales probably bottomed in mid-2010 and have flat lined since then.

Back in 2009, when I first wrote about the two bottoms, I thought we were close on housing starts and new home sales – but that it was “way too early to try to call the bottom in prices.” In real terms, house prices have fallen another 10% to 15% since I wrote that post according to the CoreLogic and Case-Shiller house price indexes.

And it now appears we can look for the bottom in prices. My guess is that nominal house prices, using the national repeat sales indexes and not seasonally adjusted, will bottom in March 2012.

The problem with using the house price indexes to look for a bottom is that they are reported with a significant lag. As an example, the recently released Case-Shiller index was for November and the index is an average of September, October and November – so it is a report for several months ago. The CoreLogic index is a little more current – the recent release was for December, and CoreLogic uses a weighted average for prices (December weighted the most) – but that is still quite a lag.

Both of those indexes will bottom seasonally around March, and then start increasing again.

There are several reasons I think that house prices are close to a bottom. First prices are close to normal looking at the price-to-rent ratio and real prices (especially if prices fall another 4% to 5% NSA between the November Case-Shiller report and the March report). Second the large decline in listed inventory means less downward pressure on house prices, and third, I think that several policy initiatives will lessen the pressure from distressed sales (the probable mortgage settlement, the HARP refinance program, and more).

Of course these are national price indexes and there will be significant variability across the country. Areas with a large backlog of distressed properties – especially some states with a judicial foreclosure process – will probably see further price declines.

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/02/housing-bottom-is-here.html

Bill also added this post with more facts and graphs:

http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/2012/02/housing-two-bottoms.html

But before I could get in another word, he fired the obligatory blast, “You realtors always say that”.  He then went on to tell me his prognostications, the main one being that he thought the higher-end was going to tumble further.

When conversations go that way, I usually shut up, and just nod my head quietly.  People have strong opinions about real estate, and realtors, and I’m not going to change them in one chat.

But if I would have said something, it would have been: “The banks would have to start putting more foreclosure pressure on the high-enders to trend downward in price.”

Foreclosureradar provides some nifty graphs to follow these thoughts. For those who might be thinking the same thing, here are the San Diego County foreclosure stats for December:

The high-enders are going to be more adept at finding ways to keep their house for as long as possible. To compare, in December 2010 there were 65 notices of trustee sale issued on loan balances over $1,000,000, and only 29 have been foreclosed.

The weather has been nice and all, but we haven’t seen an explosion of seller enthusiasm like this since the boom years, and maybe never.  The fantasy-to-reality gap over the last two years has been around 20-30 points, but now it’s over 50!

Could it just be a return to 2010 list pricing?  It might be, and if buyers continue to hold out for better quality, then the average-per-sf of solds could conceivably go up too.  

It is likely that we’ll be seeing a more volatility, and/or a standoff.

For robo-real estate to succeed, sellers would have to be convinced that utilizing an auction-type method to sell their house is the best option – which it is.  The banks might convince themselves someday, because they have the experience to figure it out.

But as long as there are sellers who believe that they are the ones who determine sales price, regular realtors will be around to serve them.