Foreclosed Properties Data Articles

$22.8 million will be given to Columbus in the hope of lessening Ohio foreclosures. The city had an estimate of 4,600 homes or more last month.

City Council is expected to favor a plan of spending the funds for more than 5 years. In addition, some city officials will start looking for 2 areas that deserve to benefit from the funds.

Columbus House Administrator Rita Parise said that they will deal with the most difficult houses from the most difficult neighborhoods in the city. Columbus wants to purchase foreclosed properties and they will repair and then sell it to people with low and average salaries.

The plan is similar to Home Again which is another program of the city. It began two years ago and had $25 million funds.

According to Councilwoman Charleta B. Tavares, they will look for partners so that the money can be used to greater extent. An 8-hour counseling for buyers should be completed to prevent financial difficulties encountered by the past owners.

A lot of buyers are going to be qualified for loans with 0% interest, as well as assistance in down-payment with the help of nonprofit groups. Not only that, new and restored houses will be equipped with energy-saving fixtures to help the owners reduce the utility expenses.

There are places that are most likely to be provided with the money such as Hilltop, some areas in South Linden and North Linden and South Side. Places mentioned have the highest number of foreclosures and mortgages considered as sub prime.

Decisions are going to be finalized by March 2009.

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Columbus is looking forward to construct homes faster and they plan to screen potential house buyers as well. There are 50 people on the waiting list in terms of giving assistance in down-payment, according to The Economic and Community Development Institute.

Nearly seven percent of houses in Augusta have been foreclosed, according to data compiled by the federal Department of Housing & Urban Development. As of the first week of November, 142 homes have been foreclosed and 95 of them are located in an area in south Augusta bounded by Spirit Creek and Gordon Highway.

According to Sammie Sias, president of the Richmond County Neighborhood Alliance, the area attracted a lot of first-time homebuyers, most of them young families who paid their amortizations on two incomes. He also said that among the foreclosed homes were units previously owned by military personnel who could not sell them when they were reassigned.

Because of the city’s high foreclosure rate, which is second only to Clayton County’s nearly ten percent foreclosure rate and above the state’s 5.2 percent, Augusta automatically qualified for federal funds granted under the housing rehabilitation and economic recovery law passed by President Bush’s administration last summer.

Georgia’s Assistant Housing Director Hawthorne Welcher Jr. said that eligible homeowners could get a second-mortgage loan up to the amount of $20,000 from the almost $2.5 million allocated for Augusta. Qualified developers can also get loans from the same funding to acquire and rehabilitate foreclosed properties and then rent them out to low-income families. For eligible homeowners, ten percent of the second-mortgage loans provided could be wiped off each year for ten years. The loans would be used to cover gaps between the cost of a house and the amount of loan extended by a bank.

The other Georgia cities which automatically qualified for the federal funding were Columbus, which received a little over $3 million, and the city of Savannah, which received $2 million. Columbus has a 6.3-percent foreclosure rate while Savannah has six percent.

Based on information compiled by Augusta’s Department of Housing & Community Development, the rapid-growth neighborhoods had high number of abandoned, deteriorating houses left by first-time homeowners who were living on tight budgets.

RealtyTrac has reported that approximately 300,000 notices about different types of foreclosures have been served in the month of August alone. The report also said that some hundreds of the thousand notices might have already been sent after that month.

The figures stated in the report are really alarming for most real estate companies. But in the case of WSR Preservation, the numbers just mean more business.

WSR Preservation is owned by John Plocher. This California-based company by Plocher is mainly concerned with property maintenance. As a matter of fact, WSR Preservation specializes in the cleaning and maintenance of foreclosed homes.

One of the company’s main jobs is to gather the properties left behind by the families who have occupied the foreclosed properties. The experiences he gained from his company taught him the literal meaning of ‘expect the unexpected’

Plocher said that at first, he was surprised to find that families tend to leave behind valuable personal properties in their foreclosed homes. He cited a particular case where a family has left an urn of cremated remains inside their house. Plocher also said that, generally, people leave a lot of things in their former homes.

Although homeowners were aware that they are soon facing foreclosure problems, Plocher noted that they seem to have left their foreclosed properties in a hurry. At one time, his team arrived in a house that has a refrigerator filled with food. Plocher attributed this to the possible sadness or maybe depression that the homeowners are likely to have experienced.

Arik Jensen, one of WSR’s employees, also shares the same observation with his boss. He said that he sometimes finds a doll lying on the floor. Such occasions makes him think of the little owner of the doll who might probably crying for its lost.

WSR maintained that properties they have gathered are sent to the dumpsters. In some cases, valuable ones are requisitioned by the bank that owned the foreclosures.

The 2009 Emerging Trends in Real Estate report released by PricewaterhouseCoopers LP and Urban Land Institute stated that the market value of commercial real estate is expected to bottom out in 2009, which could result in the increased flow of foreclosed properties into the market.

From November 4 to 9, people of Ohio and Pennsylvania will be given a chance to purchase homes in discounted prices when Hudson and Marshall auction about 500 foreclosed properties in these states.

Democratic legislators, in a bid to help troubled homeowners gain time to work on the modifications on their mortgages, are proposing a 120-day moratorium on foreclosures. This was met with several oppositions from various sectors, including the housing and banking industry who finds the proposal too burdensome.

The county of Ventura and its cities have qualified to receive 3.8 million grants to help homeowners and communities in the area who were affected by the housing market crisis.

Fontana City Council officials will meet and vote to decide on a program to acquire foreclosed homes, rehabilitate and sell them in an effort to revive the housing market.

Several foreclosed homes in Kansas City, Missouri have been vandalized and there were also reported cases of copper theft. These incidents have made it even tougher to sell homes that have been foreclosed, adding the tight economic market.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Neighborhood Stabilization Program (NSP) will provide Georgia with $153 million funds to purchase foreclosed homes, repair and then sell or rent them. The amount is part of the U.S. government’s $700 billion financial bailout for the banking industry.