Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Since this was posted a month ago, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo together have picked up another 150+ Cleveland properties through sheriff’s sales and sold off 84. As of close of business Friday (according to the Auditor’s database) our two champion foreclosers owned a grand total of 951 properties in the city — 532 owned by Deutsche Bank and 419 by Wells Fargo. Their new combined total for all of Cuyahoga County: Over 1,500.

I went through those 84 sales yesterday. They included:

• 37 homes sold to corporations
• 15 homes sold to individuals whose names are on four or more deeds filed in Cuyahoga County in the past two years
• Another 8 homes sold to individuals whose names are on two or three recent deeds and who currently own three or more properties in the county.

So at least 60 of the 84 sales of foreclosed homes were almost certainly to investors (flippers, landlords, hopefully even some real rehabbers) rather than new owner-occupants. Some of the remaining 24 individual buyers are probably also “investors” — out-of-state scavengers (like the ones represented by this guy or this guy, for example) who happen to have no previous history in the county.

Next research project: Let’s see if we can figure out who financed those sales.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 17th, 2007 at 5:21 am and is filed under Foreclosure crisis, Poor Cleveland, Shrinking city. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.