Dennis Jones’ Properties

MANATEE COUNTY, Fla. – April 3, 2009 – Area real-estate professionals are hoping Fannie Mae continues a limited pilot program aimed at facilitating short sales, especially as local foreclosure filings continue to hit record highs.

Since its January launch, the program has prevented at least a handful of homes in 11 Florida counties – including Manatee and Sarasota – from falling into foreclosure by making it easier to sell them for less than their outstanding mortgages.

The project initially was scheduled to last three months, but officials with a regional listing service said Wednesday they’re hoping to persuade Fannie Mae to extend it.

“We’re very excited about the project, and we’d like to see it continue,” said John Weeden, marketing manager for the Mid-Florida Regional Multiple Listing Service, which is collaborating on the pilot program and is scheduled to update Fannie Mae on its progress next week.

About 300 Florida homes are in the program, which streamlines the short sale process by getting all necessary approvals and property research done beforehand. A short sale is one in which the lender – Fannie Mae for homes in the pilot program – agrees to accept less than what is owed on the home to avoid the costs of foreclosure.

Weeden said he did not know how many short sales have closed through the program, which applies only to homes with Fannie Mae mortgages.

Quicksilver Real Estate Group Inc., a Tampa firm with an office in Bradenton, has closed three and has two others pending, broker/owner Linn Wyllie said. Those sales have come together in a matter of weeks as opposed to the several months or longer that a typical short sale can take, he said.

“It’s huge for the industry,” Wyllie said of the pilot program’s time savings.

Fannie Mae, officially known as the Federal National Mortgage Association, also launched a similar program in the Phoenix area.

The program didn’t prevent lenders from maintaining their record pace of foreclosure filings in Manatee, however. Lenders filed 608 foreclosure suits in Manatee County Circuit Court in March, the highest monthly total ever, court records show.

There have been 1,653 foreclosure actions filed through the first three months of 2008, up 33 percent from the 1,241 filed during the same period a year earlier. At that pace, last year’s record of 5,592 foreclosure filings will be broken in September.

For the third straight month, more primary homes than seasonal, vacation and rental homes fell into foreclosure: 54 percent were homesteaded, while 46 percent were not. That’s largely the result of mounting job losses and indicates foreclosures likely will remain high as the county’s unemployment rate worsens, experts said.

Copyright © 2009 The Bradenton Herald, Fla., Duane Marsteller. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

There are many good deals I’m seeing in the South Tampa market today that are foreclosures and short sales.  The short sales are a bit trickier to land, but I’ve experienced some recent success getting the lender to accept a low offer.  I just had one approved that was listed at $165K and we offered $135K.  The buyer thought I was crazy sending him that one because he was only approved at $135K.  I told him that you never know what they will take until you submit an offer.  To his delight, they accepted the $135K and he ended up getting the opportunity to own a much nicer home than he thought he would get.  It even had a very nice pool.  Foreclosures, REO’s (Real Estate Owned), and Bank Owned properties which are all the same thing, are a little easier to pick up.  Typically, we are seeing a 48 hour turn around on a response from the bank to an offer.  Unfortunately, you are up against cash buyers most of the time on the really good ones, but many will accept conventional financing and FHA.  Most are in an unacceptable condition for FHA, but not the FHA rehab loan which is becoming more and more popular.  I would be happy to go over any of the above information more in depth with you if you have interest in looking at your options.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Feb. 12, 2009 – The number of Americans on the verge of losing their homes fell in January but was still up from the same month a year ago. The numbers would have been higher if not for efforts to stall the foreclosure process.

Nationwide, more than 274,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice last month. That was down 10 percent from December, but still 18 percent higher than a year ago, according to RealtyTrac Inc., a foreclosure listing service based in Irvine, Calif. Ohio’s foreclosure rate put it in the top 10 states.

Contributing to the monthly drop was a decision by government-controlled mortgage finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to suspend foreclosure sales during the winter holidays. Plus, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist brokered a deal in which lenders in that state agreed to a 45-day halt to new foreclosure petitions.

But those efforts may not have much of an impact in the long run.

“If you don’t do anything to get to the core problem, all you’re doing is extending the housing downturn,” said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s vice president for marketing. “It’s only a good idea if there’s a corresponding program that dramatically restructures hundreds of thousands of loans.”

Meanwhile, a federal regulator on Wednesday urged more than 800 thrift institutions to suspend all foreclosures while President Barack Obama’s top economic officials develop plans to keep borrowers in their homes.

The Obama administration plans to spend $50 billion to combat foreclosures of owner-occupied, middle-class homes but is divulging few details. An announcement of the administration’s housing plans is expected in the coming weeks.

Testifying before House lawmakers on Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the government would provide incentives to “try to induce economically sensible restructuring of mortgages,” but offered no specifics.

More than 2 million American homeowners faced foreclosure proceedings last year, and that number could soar as high as 10 million in the coming years, according to a report last month by Credit Suisse, depending on the severity of the recession.

The RealtyTrac report said nearly 67,000 properties were repossessed by lenders in January as the worst recession in decades, falling home values and stricter lending standards continue to sap the U.S. real estate market. That was up from more than 45,000 repossessed properties in January 2008, but down from 79,000 in December.

Geithner and Shaun Donovan, the new secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, met with officials from housing and other nonprofit groups, top bank executives and industry lobbyists Wednesday to hear proposals for how the new programs to fight foreclosures should be structured.

After the meeting, John Taylor, chief executive of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer group in Washington, said he was optimistic the new administration would agree to use government dollars to buy up mortgages and remove them from complex mortgage-linked securities and restructuring them at more affordable levels.

He said support from government and industry officials for that idea was a “giant step forward” compared with opposition to such an approach by the Bush administration.

The Obama administration is also expected to back a push in Congress – opposed by the mortgage industry – to let bankruptcy judges alter the terms of primary home loans. Earlier this week, Obama said it “makes no sense” that judges are not allowed to do so. The mortgage industry argues that this prohibition allows lenders to charge lower rates.

In the RealtyTrac report, Nevada, California, Arizona and Florida had the nation’s top foreclosure rates. In Nevada, one in every 76 homes received a foreclosure, while the number was one every 173 in California. At No. 5, Oregon, formerly a bastion of housing stability, made its first appearance close to the top of the list of foreclosure hot spots.

Rounding out the top 10 were Illinois, Michigan, Georgia, Idaho and Ohio. Ohio had one foreclosure notice for every 452 homes, but January filings were down slightly from December and down 12 percent from a year earlier. Among metro areas, Merced, Calif., was first, with one in every 59 housing units receiving a foreclosure filing. It was followed by Las Vegas and the Cape Coral-Fort Myers area in Florida.