Financial Entities Owe Millions in Property Taxes and Maintenance Fees
Photo by Kenteegardin
Financial entities owe millions in property taxes and maintenance fees. The situation is particularly bad in Cleveland. Mark Parks of Cuyahoga County Fiscal Office (projects manager) said, “I’ve seen plenty of cases where the banks don’t take care of the homes and we have to take them into court to try and get them pay the fees”.
Since 2008, a CitiBank mortgage has been the owner of a 111 year old derelict colonial house on Laisy Avenue,Cleveland. The city authorities are due over $7,500 for tax and trimming grass fees. The house has not been listed on the market either. Mark Rodgers, the spokesperson of the bank, said that Citibank plans to donate the old house to a non-profit organization.
According to certain records, lenders are not putting properties on the market as part of a strategy that ensures future high profits. If the fragile property market is now flooded with an extra 500,000 or 1.1 million houses, most of them in crumbling condition, and are sold cheaply, it would further weaken prices.
Lenders have not given any indication that they are going to expedite sales. The increasing number of vacant houses continues to sit idle and pile up.
According to Core Logic (it has the most conservative calculation of the shadow properties), the worth of the shadow inventory is nearly $336 billion. Once these repossessed units become liquidated through various sale processes, bank balance sheets will become written down.
Banks wary about their expenditures are displaying heavy losses. Austere budgets prevent banks from tackling the problem head-on, said Ira Rheingold of the National Association of Consumer Advocates (executive director). He said, “They’re afraid. They don’t want to take those paper losses. Their books show that they have these assets that are worth ‘X’ amount of money. But those values are not real”.
The public records of Maricopa County (Arizona) show that BofA owns about 1.300 properties concentrated in mostly in cities like Phoenix and Mesa. Most of these are not being put up for sale. On the lender’s website, only 440 have been listed and openly advertised.
In many regions, the federal government agencies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together with Federal Housing Administration are the biggest property owners. Between the two, they own about 250,000 houses. A minimum of 100,000 have not entered the market till now, although there are indications that among the lenders they will be liquidating their houses more quickly.
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