STUART KORFHAGE | St. Augustine Record |
“While Florida continues to put up alarming foreclosure numbers, Circuit Court Judge Howard Maltz of St. Johns County is starting to see stats he likes.
According to data compiled by the state, Maltz and other county staff — including some senior judges — have managed to reduce the backlog of county foreclosure cases by 83 percent between Jan. 28, 2013, and Feb. 10, 2014.
When Maltz sat down at his desk on workdays in the early part of 2013, he was staring at almost 2,000 backlogged cases. Now the number of old cases (filed prior to December 2012) is just above 300.
That’s not to say there isn’t a lot of work to do. There were still 1,027 foreclosures filed in St. Johns County in 2013 and another 134 filed in the first two months of this year.
“We have actively taken this posture to eliminate the (backlog),” Maltz said. “It’s still a beast but not as bad of a beast.”
Current numbers from RealtyTrac show 1 in 529 homes in St. Johns County to be in foreclosure. That’s considerably better than the state average of 1 in 346, which is the highest in the county. The data are from January 2014.
Maltz said there are a variety of reasons the cases are no longer languishing. The main reason is the simplest: Fewer filings.
When Maltz took over the civil division from Judge Michael Traynor a little more than a year ago, the number of filings was just starting to decline in the county. In October 2012, there were 142 foreclosures filed in St. Johns County, but at the peak of the housing crisis, there were 200 filings per month here.
And it wasn’t a local phenomenon. RealtyTrac said there were 485,000 Florida properties with foreclosure filings in 2010.
State still leads the pack
Florida is still the nation’s leader in foreclosures, with almost 270,000 filings last year.”