Hurricanes 2004-5 created market shortage, helped inflate prices.
Insurance doubled and tripled for primary residences
Second homes, non owner occupied homes became almost uninsurable for a while...and it being uninsured or uninsurable makes it almost impossible to sell
Increased prices meant taxes increased and insurance increased
So....when the monthly payment goes up by hundreds and when it becomes impossible or rent the property...it can become impossible to maintain property in Florida.
About time somebody quotes these statistics accurately!! Virtually everybody else in the media keeps putting Las Vegas at the top of the foreclosure list because we have a higher ‘percentage’ based on our much, much, much smaller state. Florida has like 5 or 10 times more foreclosures than Nevada.
Via Las Vegas. And go grab that Miami Beach real estate now before things turns around and you have to pay Euro-trash prices for it again.
It sounds bizarre to say but all that building which occurred in the last few years which is now sitting vacant is an asset which these cities are thrilled to have because they will creating the tax base of the future. When builders lose their shorts building giant skycraper-shaped penises as monuments to themselves and the people who wanted to speculate by buying them, they leave an asset which later investors and homeowners will come to enjoy at a price which is finally reasonable or just downright a steal. And those cities will finally rake in all the tax dollars from the real estate being used and their downtowns will have another resurgence from the occupancy of those buildings.
Same thing happened in Miami in the 80s when the Cartel built craploads of projects and entire subdivisions with their drug money and then abandoned it when Bush 41 busted Noreiga and everybody else by the end of the decade. Miami got to use all that development later to create the South Beach lifestyle and all those buildings got occupied by new tenants who started building a tax base. It’s a gigantic gift to a city when you come in and build gigantic structures and then lose your own money doing it. Somebody else gets to utilize it without having to have had the money to build it and the economy goes on. It’s called creative-destruction. Unless you are talking about stock/commodity trading, almost all economy infusions leave assets behind when a venture fails which end up being cheap infrastructure to those who come behind them. When an airline goes under, the planes down disappear or explode spontaneously. They get bought at auction prices by companies like RyanAir, JetBlue or Southwest and become a cheap way to get into the airline industry which otherwise would have been too pricey to get started in.
Adam Smith would be thrilled to see that his theories were still holding water hundreds of years later. And Marx would still be spinning in his grave that we allow people to ‘fail’ in capitalism while still having other people becoming ‘rich’. But hey, Marx was a gigantic tool like Keith Olbermann so who cares!!
It would be interesting to see how many of these foreclosures are homes that are not owner-occupied.
Boy, statistics are used creatively to shape opinion. These numbers lead people to envision all these beautiful middle class homes in distress.
What we need to know is what are these delinquent mortgages like? What is the distribution of amounts, and types of properties. There are so many parks in Florida with average home prices in the thousands of dollars, (Not hundreds of thousands). What is the normal delinquency rate? Are these properties being abandoned because of high taxes and insurance rates? Are people taking advantage of the financial mess to become squatters in the anticipation that they will be overlooked in the mess or better yet, bailed out (by you and me!)?
I’m not worried as I understand that many of the foreclosed properties are being occupied by those having genuine need.