BY JAMES L. ROSICA | Tribune staff |
TALLAHASSEE – “In the week before Gov. Rick Scott’s deadline to sign a bill that would speed up the state’s residential mortgage foreclosure process, bank employees flooded his inbox with a form letter urging his approval.
The bill “will help Florida’s real estate market, and ultimately the economy, by expediting the judicial foreclosure process which currently takes an average of 800 days to complete,” the message reads in part.
The strategy may have helped; Scott quietly signed the bill Friday afternoon.
It “will put (foreclosed) homes back onto the housing market and allow Florida families who have experienced a foreclosure to begin working to repair their credit and finances,” the governor said in a signing letter.
As of Friday afternoon, more than 300 messages had been emailed to Scott’s public account at flgov.com. Return addresses include domains for banks across the state, including First Citrus Bank, Jefferson Bank and Nature Coast Bank in the Tampa Bay area.
Calls to those banks weren’t immediately returned. Scott had until Wednesday to sign or veto the bill.
Anthony DiMarco, chief lobbyist for the Florida Bankers Association, said his group was behind the email blast.
Banks “don’t want to foreclose; we want to work with a borrower,” he explained. “But the sooner someone can buy the property and move in, they take care of the property, pay taxes and get the neighborhood’s property values back up.”
DiMarco was quick to note many of his members don’t actually own the mortgages but service them for another entity, usually Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, government-controlled companies that buy residential mortgages and re-sell them to investors.
Florida still leads the country with 102,000 foreclosures over the last year, according to an April report by real estate data tracking firm CoreLogic.”