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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (107280)	1/12/2012 2:18:44 PM
From: bentway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 149317

-some interesting news from your neck of the woods- Last year, there were 11,476 foreclosure actions compared with 25,336 in 2010 and 22,729 in 2009, RealtyTrac's data showed. "What happened is that people stopped giving their homes to banks after uncontested rocket-docket hearings," said Jack McCabe, a Deerfield Beach real estate consultant. "They started getting lawyers and those lawyers discovered that banks had been presenting improper and sometimes fraudulent documents to the courts. Once that sank in, banks realized they had a disastrous problem. They had to fire their old attorneys and hire new ones who had to review all their files." There were 371,000 open foreclosure cases in Florida at the end of 2011, McCabe said. It took the new attorneys the whole year to determine which of those cases could stand the test of the judicial foreclosure process and which could not. Now McCabe expects the rate of foreclosure filings to rise for the next 18 months. "On top of that, we are going to see more banks solicit short sales on the homes they can't bring to foreclosure," he said. The spike in filings during December did not carry across Florida or the nation. State filings fell slightly from November and dropped 4.5 percent from a year ago. Nationally, filings were down 9 percent from November and 20 percent from a year ago. But most foreclosure experts agreed that the long lull caused by the robo-signing crisis was coming to an end. "There were strong signs in the second half of 2011 that lenders are finally beginning to push through some of the delayed foreclosures in select local markets," said Brandon Moore, RealtyTrac's chief executive. "We expect that trend to continue this year, boosting foreclosure activity for 2012 higher than it was in 2011, though still below the peak of 2010." There are about 900,000 properties in Florida that are in some stage of distress — 370,000 already in foreclosure and another 530,000 with mortgages that are 90 days past due, McCabe said. Of those, about 720,000 will have to be sold through foreclosure or short sales within the next 18 to 36 months, McCabe predicted. He thinks that will push prices down about 5 percent. heraldtribune.com