Texas Bankruptcy Lawyer & Attorney : Fears Nachawati law Firm : Chapter 7, Chapter 13, Consumer Bankrutpcy : Dallas, Fort Worth, Austin, Houston, San Antonio

Jacksonville is heading into the third year of the real estate slump and the number of home foreclosures continues to rise. The San Antonio News also reports ,so many homes are being auctioned off at the Duval County Courthouse that in July, the foreclosure auctions will be put online to move them through faster.

"I don't see any bright skies on the horizon," said University of North Florida real estate professor Sid Rosenberg.

Evelyn Mew, the Jacksonville grandmother pictured at right, was able to save her home after falling behind on her mortgage payments. Thousands of others have not been so fortunate. Local agencies, such as Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, are quickly trying to gear up to help, but the caseload is heavier each month.

Meanwhile, a cottage industry has developed.

KB Home, one of the nation's largest homebuilders, reported a larger second-quarter loss Friday, as weak sales and falling home prices led to a 55% drop in revenue. The San Antonio News also reported that the company also booked charges to lower the value of unsold homes, joint venture deals and land option contracts.

The Los Angeles-based company reported a loss of $255.9 million, or $3.30 per share, for the three months ended May 31. A year ago, it lost $148.7 million, or $1.93 per share.

The latest results included a $176.5 million charge to cut the value of its unsold homes and to abandon some land option contracts.

Revenue plunged to $639.1 million from $1.41 billion in the year-ago period. The decline was driven by lower housing and land sale revenues, the builder said.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial were expecting KB to post a loss of 94 cents per share on revenue of $691.3 million. The earnings estimates typically exclude one-time items.

This morning The Dallas Morning News Reported, home prices took another dip in the latest measure of the U.S. housing market.

Local home prices fell 3.4 percent in April from a year earlier in the Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller home price index released Tuesday.

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Map: Dallas-Fort Worth home sales and prices
The local decline is much lower than the 15.3 percent falloff in prices for the 20 cities surveyed in the monthly report. It was the largest nationwide drop in home prices on record.

Across the country, home prices have retreated to levels last seen in August 2004.

Every city in the benchmark Case-Shiller April report saw prices lower than a year ago.

Las Vegas and Miami had the biggest price declines, down more than 26 percent from last year.

The smallest decline was in Charlotte, N.C. – down 0.1 percent.

But there were small gains in some markets in April compared with March, including a 1.1 percent increase in Dallas.

"There might be some regional pockets of improvement, but on an annual basis the overall numbers continue to decline," Standard & Poor's David Blitzer said.

"If there is anywhere to look for possible improvement, it would be that the pace of monthly declines has slowed down for most of the markets," Mr. Blitzer said.

Case-Shiller tracks the prices of typical single-family homes in each metropolitan area.

The index survey does not include condominiums and townhouses. It only covers pre-owned properties – no new construction.

The Case-Shiller researchers compare "arms-length sales" of specific single-family homes over time.

Also Tuesday, the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight reported that its home price index showed a 4.6 percent nationwide decline in prices for the 12 months ending in April.

But in the region that includes Texas, prices were up 1.9 percent from a year ago.

Agency surveys don't include all houses sold in the market and only those with mortgages of less than $417,000.

A report released this week by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies suggests that a turnaround in the nation's depressed housing market is a ways off.

Harvard's State of the Nation's Housing 2008 study