by Alain Jehlen in Economy & Poverty, Housing, Neighborhoods and Squares
Posted on June 8, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Last Modified on June 11, 2009 at 1:08 pm
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Here’s a link to a map that shows 99 foreclosed properties in our city. Are we surprised that they are concentrated in the east and northeast?
Here’s a link to a somewhat shorter list without a map.
The fact that they’re not the same raises the question of whether either one of them is complete.
Do any real estate brokers want to comment on this? Is anybody who reads Somerville Voices being foreclosed on? Probably most of these 99 are tragic stories.
Finding these web sites was an indirect result of our crowd-funding experiment. Some of us met Saturday to pick the first few stories we will try to fund that way, and one of them was a monthly foreclosure map of the city.
But then Barry Rafkind found these links through Google!
The website with the map has 55 foreclosures listed for Cambridge, 110 for Medford.
The 99 for Somerville is six fewer than it was just yesterday, so the list clearly changes fast. We’ll check back.
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Alain, while I am sure that there is a percentage of “tragic” stories regarding these foreclosures (i.e. people losing jobs, divorced, or becoming too injured to work), I am sure that some of these houses were purchased by people who clearly knew they could not afford them. I did bankruptcy law for years and ran into people like this on a daily basis. I cannot excuse all foreclosures as being tragic.
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well, for what it is worth, the information from homes.com is seriously flawed. i have checked out 20 of the properties supposedly listed as foreclosures on this list.
let me explain what i mean. first, just because a lien holder (bank) applies for the ability to foreclose, means little to next to nothing. it is just the lien holder shoring up its rights, typically to sell the asset off. second, the ones that have a supposed “mls” or “property” id number – mls listings begin with the number 7 – even if i go to the trouble of replacing the “2″ with a “7″ under the assumption that it’s a mild bait and switch – none of the numbers match any current mls listings in Somerville.
so the data is seriously flawed.
also, just a three minute check of sales records i have at my disposal, indicates that only 23 properties that have been foreclosed on, and recorded, and have not re-sold, are listed.
that last bit of information is seriously deceiving as well – and the reason is simply that in massachusetts, you can take title to a property, and not record the deed until a later date.
so what i am getting at is simple, since most of my regular job is spent analyzing this type of data: it is near impossible to get a hyper-accurate accounting of foreclosed properties, and because this city is different than other communities (like lynn for example), it doesn’t suffer the same kinds of trends when it comes to bank-owned properties.
i have wanted to sit down and analyze all the data available to me to do such a study, but it would take much longer than i have available to study…maybe at some point before the end of the year, some people would like to sit down, have me explain the data sets and then maybe as a group, try to get a handle on what the analyzed data would tell us as a community.
to speak to more generalized statements, i agree with janine – having worked in this industry day in and day out as a realtor, a licensed real estate appraiser, a former mortgage broker and as an economic analyst, equal blame needs to be spread around – amongst the lenders, the government for pushing quotas and the end-user – the borrower themselves.
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Thanks for the info! Real estate is obviously not my field.
But I do hope we can find ways to track what’s happening with housing in our city. Not just foreclosures, but other measures.
If you do decide to start a group to study foreclosures here, post a note on SV–you may get volunteers.
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mr norton has forgotton one group who should also shoulder some of the balme here. to the less that honest real estate brokers, who knew full well that some of the borrowers would not be able to afford some of these loans but pushed the clients into buying anyway, step up and take responsibility.
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somerspeak –
yes, that is very true. thankfully, from what i can tell, not much of that has happened, if at all, in this community. most of the “collaborative” predatory real estate dealings happened in cities like lawrence, lynn and brockton – where the agent was the mortgage officer or had some other secondary tie into the stream of money.
however, the real estate agents would be a far fourth place in the grand scheme of things…i consider the three i listed as far and away the most culpable. attorneys right behind the agents – and then theres everyone else down the line as being minorly contributing to the problem.
just to be clear – make no mistake about it – lenders, the govt and the borrowers are at the very top of the ladder on this issue.
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yikes, james, i agree. just wanted to make sure all parties were accounted for.
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JN – at what point (if any) do you as a realtor, instinctively realize people are looking (way) outside of their price range when looking to buy a property? Is there a responsibility to say, hey, you shouldn’t be looking in this price range?
Just wondering.
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Tricky, when my husband and I bought our house in 2005, we had a very good broker who kept us on the up and up (the broker was not JN-who is good too). But, we also had some common sense in that we knew we could not reasonably afford something that was over $600k without cutting back from other things. JN is right that some of the brokers have a vested interest other than their commission (i.e. being the mortgage officer). People should do some research or even take a class prior to buying. I know in RI they have classes for people who want to be first time home owners and once the course is completed they get a $10,000 credit towards a house.
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tricky –
i wouldn’t personally show a house to anyone who doesn’t have a pre-approval from a reputable lender, period. that is the benchmark for any reputable realtor – and quite frankly – saves a lot of time.
you want to buy a house, cool – how much did your mortgage person say you could afford. is that mortgage person reputable? what were the criteria for pre-qualification? was it a pre-qual or an actual pre-approval, subject to only an acceptable appraisal?
there are many different questions a reputable realtor would ask prior to spending even ten minutes with someone looking for a house. remember, realtors don’t get paid a salary – they get paid when they sell a house, that’s it.
personally, if someone is a dreamer – whether they’re buying or selling – i advise them of the problems they are facing and if they don’t see reason, ask them to go elsewhere and call me when they’re ready to be serious.
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Thanks, Janine and James – in particular for the suggestion/offer to do with better collection and assessment of data. I do a lot of community health work with Tufts and good data that can be presented in a meaningful way is difficult for community groups to obtain and manage. Maybe there is some way to attract the attention of some one or ones over there who are interested in city planning and development – or MIT, they also have city planning and community organizing interests and resources.
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alex –
the determination of good vs faulty data when it comes to real estate, plus the “unknown” factor – those properties that may have sold and not had their deed recorded – makes this a truly daunting task.
i want to both out so nobody has the wrong idea – when i brought up about the flawed data from this posting, it wasn’t meant as a shot across alain’s bow – i just want to make sure when discussing this kind of information, people understand that to even get close to decent data sets is next to impossible…
then analyzing the data is a whole other bag of tricks. i just this morning completed an analysis of monthly sales and economic trends for middlesex, essex and suffolk counties for a large national bank.
it is something i would be willing to lead at some point later on in the summer, but i would need some help and it would have to be people that have had analytical experience in either the real estate or economic fields…but thats something to mull around later on i suspect.
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It’s too late for me to gather all my thoughts about the foreclosure issue, but here are a few:
1) CAAS (Community Action Agency of Somerville, where I’m Advocacy Director) was one of the first on the block to see the foreclosure tsunami coming, not because we’re wonderful but because we scrutinize the eviction summons issued by the court every week. THe trouble is that by the time the homeowner or tenants are being evicted, it’s way, way, way too late to do anything.
2) We are planning to take some action this summer to knock on the doors of people whose houses are in the process of being foreclosed on, whether they’re the homeowners or tenants who don’t know they may lose their apartment. Daniel Hauck from the City of Somerville Housing Department will be collaborating with CAAS on this project. We will be informing homeowners and tenants of their rights (including the first and most important — ONLY A JUDGE CAN MAKE YOU MOVE!) We are also working to set up a monthly foreclosure information clinic at CAAS.
3) My guess is that there are not 90 homes that have been foreclosed on that are for sale at this moment. From what I can tell, the best information comes from Banker and Tradesmen, because every week they make some peon pick up all the filings of the first papers in the foreclosure process. However, at some point last year they and the Globe had very different information, and I trust the Globe more, so the lesson is that it’s pretty hard to get good information on this stuff. I keep wanting to put pins in our map of Somerville to track foreclosures, but the Banker and Tradesman and the Warren Group do not list the house numbers, just the street name, so if there’s a foreclosure on ALbion street I don’t know where along its length the house is located.
However, CHAPA apparently has very good, very current information about foreclosure filings, that we will be using to target homeowners and tenants. I don’t have the numbers on hand here at home, but my guess is that there have been about 60 foreclosures in Somerville in the last 12 months. Not as bad as 90, but still far too many.
4) Yes, it’s true that some people simply made a bad financial decision. Some of those decisions were helped along by fraud and/or deception, and some of them were made through sheer ignorance. In some cases, people didn’t know what they didn’t know! We’re all guilty of that in areas of our lives. We don’t know who is losing their home because of bad financial decisions and who is losing their homes because of loss of income due to layoff, or illness, or who is losing their home because they took out a second mortgage to pay for college or for a child’s detox, or because they didn’t know that they needed an inspection and it turns out their house is falling down and needs expensive repair. There are a million reasons why people don’t pay their mortgages. Some of those made the decisions were helped along by fraud or deception. There may be a few whose decisions I really will question. But even if I question the wisdom of their choices, they still deserve as much information and assistance as I would give anyone. We won’t know who made bad decisions until we talk to these people as part of a deliberate program to provide them with help.
5) I think we will need volunteers to help doorknock once we put this program together, so if you want to help, please contact me at 617-623-1392 x. 108. Thanks!
Melissa McWhinney
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Well, if anyone figures out where the latest foreclosure & auction notices are going down in and around Somerville/Arlington/Cambridge could you please post the info? I am trying to accumulate as much cheap real estate as I can right now and really looking for tax lien types – as you can grab those real cheap (just pay the lien off).
One man’s stupidity/drunkeness/slothfullness is another man’s gain.
Thanks
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Alain, it’s probably moot at this point, but the first link you posted(“link to a map”) currently points people to the Roost home page, not to any kind of map that your search might have produced. Thought you’d want to know.
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There seems to be something wrong with their site. It keeps zipping through the list of realtors over and over. Let’s see if they fix it, otherwise I’ll need to change the post.
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