MIAMI—Lenders repossessed more than 10,000 properties in the tri-county area in the first quarter. That’s the highest number since the South Florida real estate market crashed in 2007, according to CondoVultures.
Specifically, lenders foreclosed on 10,200 properties in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties in the first 90 days of 2012. That compares to about 9,200 repos in the year-ago period. CondoVultures based its research on Clerk of the Court records in each of the three counties.
“I’ve run into some properties that have taken 700 days to foreclose, so many of these foreclosures were initiated a long time ago,” Peter Zalewski, a principal with Condo Vultures, tells GlobeSt.com. “Going forward we won’t see many more newly initiated foreclosures because the National Mortgage Settlement pushes toward every other option than foreclosure except in the worst case scenario.”
Altogether, CondoVultures reports, more than 165,000 South Florida properties have forcibly changed ownership since the real estate crash of 2007. CondoVultures predicts this number will climb because more than 300,000 notices of default have been filed against properties in the region.
"The unanswered question is when are the lenders going to put the bank repossession on the resale market for purchase,” Zalewski says. As of mid-April, there were less than 1,600 bank-owned residential properties on the resale market in South Florida, according to an analysis by the licensed Florida brokerage CVR Realty. That’s less than 5% of the total number of condos, townhouses, and single-family houses on the resale market in South Florida, according to Zalewski’s analysis of Florida Realtors Association data.
“I would anticipate we are probably past the peak,” Zalewski says. “It’s probably going to be a continuous steady number of foreclosures going forward. It seems like the worst is past us. This is the clean up and I don’t expect a whole new wave of new foreclosure filings to be initiated.”
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