Orange County: It's not like what you see on TV

[moh malekpour]

http://realestate.msn.com/Buying/Article_busweek.aspx?cp-documentid=7042488&GT1=35000

The reality of a real-estate industry in the tank, job losses, foreclosed homes and empty office space is a far cry from the glitz and fantasy of popular TV shows set in the California county.

The sun still sets magnificently on the cliffs of Laguna Beach. The Angels are slugging away on another could-be-the-champs baseball season. Over in Disneyland — the self-proclaimed Happiest Place on Earth — a new attraction debuts in June. The Innovations Dream House will show off high-tech gadgetry from Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard while allowing guests to interact with the fictional Elias family as it prepares to attend a soccer tournament in China. (Microsoft is the publisher of MSN Real Estate.)

If they weren't make-believe, the Eliases would probably be postponing that trip and worrying about their jobs. They might even be fighting foreclosure on their Dream House. That's life in Orange County these days as the subprime disaster comes home to roost.

A 1,000-square-mile swath of well-heeled suburbia just south of Los Angeles, the "O.C." was the main headquarters for dozens of mortgage companies that have now gone bust, among them Ameriquest, once the nation's largest subprime lender, and New Century, once among the top 10. As a result, the region is one of the hardest-hit by the collapse of the housing market. Big builders such as Lennar are putting new construction on hold. The Orange County Register calculates that 43 local mortgage outfits laid off about 7,200 workers last year.

Bill Spitalnick, an appraiser who worked at both Ameriquest and Fremont, says he sent out résumés to every lender he could think of in Orange County and never even got a call back. He says most of the people he knew in the business aren't working and are, like him, living for the most part off their savings. He now spends much of his time writing letters to the editors of local publications. "It's going to get worse before it gets better," Spitalnick says. "It just started out small, and now it's affecting the whole world."

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Life in southern California ... it can't get any better than this.

 

[Lloyd Bonafide]

We've still got the best weather in the country, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.........

 

[Smokey Bear]

I grew up in Orange County, back when there were orange groves and you could see Catalina from Newport Beach. It was not the land of the "beautiful people" that it's become. I miss Newport, went to high school there, but it's become something I don't recognize.