Case: Foreclosing lenders own 2% of county’s homes
The Mandel School has finally published the Poverty Center’s research on the number of Cuyahoga County homes owned by financial institutions as the result of foreclosures. (H/t CCPW.) The study by Mike Schramm and Claudia Coulton doesn’t name the institutions, but it does break the data out by community and explain its significance pretty well. Here’s the take-home graph:
The report says:
As of February 2007… These properties represented 2.05% of the single, two, three family homes and condominiums in the county. Most of the properties in the hands of financial and real estate institutions as of February 2007 had completed foreclosure some time in 2006, but approximately 10% of them had been without a private individual owner for more than 14 months.
The percentage in the city of Cleveland was almost 4%.
As I’ve been documenting here for the last few weeks, large numbers of new sheriffs’ deeds continue to be added to these totals on a weekly basis.
One aspect of this phenomenon that I haven’t written about yet, and that Case’s report doesn’t address, is the number of homes that have been taken by lenders through sheriff’s sales and then sold off.
As of Monday, the Auditor’s database showed that Wells Fargo Bank owned 582 homes in the county, but Recorder’s data shows that they’ve sold off 275 other homes since the beginning of the year — so the total passing through Wells Fargo’s hands so far this year is actually 857. Similarly, Deutsche Bank owned 801 properties as of Monday — but they’ve sold off another 384 since the beginning of the year, for a total of 1,185.
A review of these two banks’ sales for the last month indicates that most of the foreclosed properties were picked up by companies and multiple owners — i.e. they went right back into the “investment” market.
More about this in the near future.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:23 pm
I would like to know whether the foreclosure filings have increased since Cuyahoga County now sells delinquent tax liens to third party debt collectors. It appears that minimal effort is made by the County to locate the true owners of the delinquent properties to collect the taxes, including the failure of the auditor’s office to look through its own records to determine that properties have been transferred through divorce, dissolutions, estates, etc. These documents, which are housed by the county in their ordinary course of business, could lead to locating the owners of the properties. Instead, the county has seen fit to loose a debt collector on those delinquent owners, and with no accountability the debt collectors who have purchased the liens, ie Xspand, then takes the liens and files foreclosures on those properties without searching for the correct record owner.
It appears to me that a search of the county court docket will reveal a significant number of foreclosures filed under “Plymouth Park LLC,” which is the Cleveland name for XSpand. It seems to me that the same county which espouses concern over the number of foreclosures is adding, at a significant rate, to the foreclosure nightmare in this County. Maybe someone should look into this problem as well.
August 19th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
[...] Just read a post at Callahan’s Cleveland Diary, it looks like 10,000 homes in Cuyahoga County will be foreclosed this year. This means next year when they attempt to collect the property taxes for these homes, they won’t receive a dime, unless there is a new owner. [...]
December 24th, 2007 at 10:58 am
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