Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

Is the Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court’s Foreclosure Mediation Program having any impact on the number of sheriff’s sales resulting from foreclosures in Cleveland?

No such impact is apparent so far.

The Mediation Program was rolled out at the end of June.  Homeowners receiving 28-day foreclosure notices can ask to have their cases assigned to mediation rather than trial before a magistrate.  If a case is already on the Court’s docket, the magistrate can decide to refer it to the Mediator. In either case, the Mediator reviews the case, decides whether it’s appropriate for mediation, and then (if it’s accepted) schedules it for a process that includes a pre-mediation conference and then, a month or so later, an actual mediation session.

The first pre-mediation conferences were held in early September and actual mediation sessions began in the first week of October. So if this process is actually reducing the number of foreclosure cases that end in sheriff’s sales to any significant extent, that impact should be showing up by now.

Courtesy of NEO CANDO,  here are the weekly sheriff’s sales of properties in the city of Cleveland since the beginning of August. The blue line shows the sales for each date; the red line shows a running average of sales for each date and the prior three weeks.

The number of sheriff’s sales in the city varies week to week, but averaged over several weeks it’s pretty consistently in a range between the high 40s and low 60s.  If mediation was having a significant impact, you’d expect to see that average start falling off in November — not just to the low end of the “normal” range, but to a new, lower range.

So far, however, this doesn’t seem to be happening.

Of course  you could say it’s still early, and the Mediation Program may not have reached its true potential.  But the Court has been planning the Program for over a year, and fending off proposals by community groups to expand and strengthen it for almost that whole time. How long can Cleveland wait to see a real impact?

We’ll keep watching.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 10:52 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.