Mary Shanklin | Orlando Sentinel |
“More than 5,200 Orlando-area houses in foreclosure sat vacant during the second quarter, making the region one of the leading “zombie” foreclosure markets in the country, a new report shows.
In Orange, Seminole, Lake and Osceola counties, 22,700 houses and condos were in some stage of foreclosure during the second quarter, and almost one-fourth of them were vacant, according to the report released Thursday by RealtyTrac. The metro area ranked sixth in the nation for its pool of empty, lifeless properties, sometimes called “zombies.”
Lue Burchfield has a view of Metro Orlando’s zombie problem from her immaculately kept home in the Conway area of Orange County. Looking out her front screened door, she sees a deteriorating house that has been vacant about a year.
“The woman who lived there had done a lot of landscaping. It was beautiful,” said Burchfield, who has lived there about 20 years. Now, the yard is choked with weeds, the siding near the front door has a gash in it and the garage door has mold creeping up from the bottom.
“It has been horrible to look at, and it makes me feel like I would be losing money if I wanted to sell my house,” she said.
Florida had a third of the nation’s overall inventory of empty foreclosures, according to the report, which tracked postal records. The Sunshine State had 48,630 owner-abandoned homes — almost four times more than second-place New York.
One reason for the inventory of darkened, deteriorating houses is that Florida’s foreclosure process requires banks to go through the courts. The average Florida foreclosure takes more than 13 months — longer than any state other than New York.
“Florida had the perfect storm of a dramatic boom and sales cycle that created a lot of distress, and then a dysfunctional foreclosure system that really broke down under the weight of those foreclosures,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac. “And that created a lot of foreclosures stuck in limbo for a long period of time, and that was a fertile breeding ground for zombies.”
Within the four-county Orlando area, Orange County had the greatest number of the empty houses in foreclosure, with 3,117. Seminole had the greatest proportion of them, with 29 percent of the county’s foreclosures sitting empty during the second quarter, according to RealtyTrac’s analysis. The percentage of foreclosures that were empty decreased in Seminole, Osceola and Lake counties from the second quarter of last year but edged up in Orange.
The vacant homes quickly become run down and lead to declining values for neighborhoods. Unpaid taxes and homeowner-association fees and can make the properties more difficult to sell.
“These are some of the most frustrating properties for real-estate agents because they are usually obviously distressed but not easy to resolve because the homeowner is hard to find and the bank isn’t taking responsibility,” Blomquist said.
Burchfield, who lives about 10 blocks north of Lake Conway, said she called Orange County code enforcement office two months ago and reported the condition of the vacant house across the street. At that point, one of the front windows had been left open and exposed to rain for a few months. Someone came a few weeks later and closed the window and a service mowed the lawn.
“It’s very disconcerting with the value of your own property,” she said.
The number of vacant properties in foreclosure has been declining nationally faster than it has been in Florida. From the second quarter of 2013 to the same period this year, the inventory dropped 16 percent for the U.S., 12 percent for Florida and only 6 percent for Metro Orlando.
Of Florida’s 195,183 residential properties being foreclosed by lenders, 25 percent were not occupied during the second quarter. A year ago, 39 percent of the 231,378 foreclosure houses in Florida had no one living in them.
Across Florida, both Miami and Tampa had more vacant foreclosures. But the proportion of foreclosed homes that were empty varied widely, from 18 percent in Tampa to 23 percent in Orlando and 30 percent in Miami.”