Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac, an online marketplace for foreclosure properties, has partnered with Yahoo! Real Estate to create the Yahoo! Real Estate Foreclosure Center – an initiative that launched this week to help seasoned and inexperienced buyers capitalize on the potential for investment in today’s growing foreclosure market.

With changes in the housing sector making homeownership more costly for buyers, many residents in Southern California are turning away from homeownership and giving apartments a second glance, according to the Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast, a report published by the University of Southern California Lusk Center for Real Estate.

San Diego, California-based Accredited Home Lenders Holding Co., a nonprime lender, announced it has closed its financing transaction with Farallon Capital Management, LLC — a move that is expected to provide the company with liquidity to continue with its strategic plans.

Grant Thorton LLP, an independent registered public accounting firm, has resigned as auditor for two subprime lenders. In press statements, Fremont Investment & Loan, a subsidiary of Fremont General Corp.

The subprime crunch has claimed yet another casualty, according to the Web site of Atlanta-based SouthStar Funding LLC. The lender has posted a letter on the Web, saying it can no longer operate in today’s difficult market.

Buffalo, New York-based M&T Bank Corp. has revealed losses in its Alt-A residential mortgage loan business, which the company says are related to challenges in the lending market. The company, in a press release, said its first quarter financial results will be affected by adverse market conditions as well as repurchases on previously sold Alt-A loans that defaulted within the first 90 days after the sale.

Santa Ana, California-based MarketLinx Inc., a provider of information technology to the residential real estate industry, has named Robert Murray senior vice president and chief information officer – a role in which Robert will oversee the establishment and direction of the company’s strategic long-term goals and policies as well as its procedures for MarketLinx’s information technology products.

A year-to-date decline in the Pending Home Sales Index — a real estate indicator that’s based on the pending sales of existing homes—may have been caused by February’s bad weather and changes in the subprime lending market, according to David Lereah, chief economist with the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

After much speculation, Irvine, California-based lender New Century Financial Corp. officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Monday. In a press statement, the embattled lender also indicated that two companies, The CIT Group and Greenwich Capital Financial Products Inc.

The UCLA Anderson Forecast, a highly regarded national economic report released this week, contains both positive and negative predictions for the current economy and the subprime lending market. In the latest report, senior economist David Shulman said a recession is not imminent, but he does expect a period of below average growth in the U.