Lee County Foreclosures Rise
Christopher and Cathy Comerota bought their Cape Coral home in December 2003 just as the boom in Florida housing prices was taking off. But now they’re looking foreclosure in the face.
They’re not alone.
Last month, 783 notices of foreclosures were filed in Lee County court, six times the number from the same period a year ago. The increase in foreclosures has been steady in a real estate market that has seen a yearlong fall in Lee County home prices and a glut of houses purchased by speculators who no longer want them.
Foreclosure is a court action filed by a creditor to take possession of a property or to force a sale to satisfy the Florida mortgage.
The surge in Lee County has come as the value of residential real estate fell like a stone throughout 2006.
Prices have been rising in recent months, but the median sale price of an existing single-family home in the county was $268,000 in April, down 16.8 percent from the all-time high of $322,000 in December 2005.
Nationally, there were 430,000 foreclosure filings in the first quarter of 2007, up 27 percent from the fourth quarter of 2006 and 35 percent up from the first quarter of 2006, according to RealtyTrac, which provides online information for the foreclosure market.
Florida, with 45,156 of those filings, ranked second to California’s 80,595, RealtyTrac reports.
Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s vice president of marketing, said the numbers appear to be leveling off, however. “We’ve been saying for two years it won’t be a tsunami that’ll take down real estate or the rest of the national economy.”
Losing a home
For the Comerotas and their two children, a series of events led to a foreclosure lawsuit filed against them March 29 by lender US Bank National Association.
“We originally bought in December of ’03. We got married July 4, 2004, and on July 7, my husband was in a car accident. In August 2005, we took a [Florida equity loan] on the house to pay for my husband’s medical bill and ended up taking equity out of the house to put a pool in,” said Cathy Comerota.
They almost sold the house soon afterward, she said, but decided not to. “We figured the market’s going down but not that bad.”
But prices plummeted, and now they find themselves owing $350,000 on a house that’s worth about $300,000. Their income is down because Cathy Comerota’s job as a mortgage processor no longer pays much in today’s slack Florida housing market, so they can’t afford the $3,000-a-month mortgage.
It didn’t help, Cathy Comerota said, that their homeowner’s insurance went from $1,200 to $3,200 this year and their property taxes went from $3,900 to $4,700.
That’s a common problem, said Gary Bates, a real estate agent with RE/MAX Realty Team in Cape Coral.
“We do mailings to people in foreclosure or near foreclosure and I’m swamped,” he said. “What we do is help them negotiate with the bank to get a better [Florida mortgage rate].”
So far, he said, “The banks are playing real hardball, but I think that as the trend continues, that’ll change. It takes us three or four offers and a couple of months to get a deal.”
Banks are especially reluctant to forgive debt on a new home because they think they’ll be able to sell it easily in foreclosure, Bates said.
SOURCE: The News-Press
