You see it, the house in Maine with no one home, the grass hay field high, idling waiting for real estate foreclosure.
Seasons come, go and you wonder why does it take so long to foreclose on a house in Maine?
The news headlines squawk loudly our country is desperate for affordable housing.
Building materials costs are going up up up while despair grows for young first-time home buyers needing a place of their own to raise a Maine family.
We all want the state’s population to grow and where is everyone going to live?
So the light bulb comes on. If new construction is not meeting the housing demand because too expensive. If your average local Maine home buyer cannot afford the monthly mortgage payments.
What about foreclosure homes in Maine to ease the kink in the hose of affordable housing?
Tapping into the steady crop of empty Maine foreclosure homes to recycle them into affordable housing stock?
The sooner the better too.
Because lack of winter heat, no power for the early spring water run off sump pump. Then years of hot summer sun blistering the peeling paint, fall leaves piling up and rotting.
Wild animals moving in and doing destruction. The broken window where the bird came in and lays on the living room rug without a proper burial.
And please, don’t open that refrigerator left fully loaded two years ago when the power got cut off for lack of payment.
Along with the heaping cat boxes, the house is empty and stuck in time, waiting for the slowly moving wheels of foreclosure justice.
A couple years vacant with the front door wide open and no one home. Just the home owner left. Everything else ran sacked crying for a 30 year dumpster. No water works draining attempted, the furnace is kaput.
The longer empty, the harder the rehab to “bring it all home” as Johnny Cash would hum.
But still, if better sooner than later, the Maine foreclosure home could be rescued, it’s win win.
For the new proud Maine real estate tax paying homeowner, for the community where you need affordable housing.
Foreclosures on Maine homes take a long time.
By law, the homeowner has to be 120 days behind on monthly mortgage payments before foreclosure action can begin.
Courts everywhere are back logged and out of state lenders are out of the loop on what’s happening to the collateral for a house loan good or bad. Lots of distressed mortgage loan inventory across the country makes it just one more delinquent property to herd through the judicial process.
Why else do foreclosures take so long on a house in Maine?
Someone is living there. Not paying rent but clinging, handing on despite the last call pleas to leave. Refusing to move despite the deputy sheriff eviction notices.
What’s the hurry? Hold your horses. Knowing it can take up to nine months or longer to finally get a judge’s eviction judgement to stick.
(Often the keys for cash route is the quickest way to “help” the home owner or renter to pick up the pace and move along).
What else slows down the house foreclosure process? Divorce, bankruptcy all combined with eviction mixed together with the foreclosure legal proceedings. The wheels of justice are expensive and slow moving as the foreclosure winds slowly through the court system.
Mortgage loan modification, mediation, events like COVID can all “pause” the foreclosure process unless a short sale, deed in lieu of foreclosure remedy happens.
And when a bank does get the foreclosed property back in their REO inventory of non-performing loan units, more delay.
Getting bids for the trash out, changing locks, boarding up broken windows, yard work to cut up fallen tree limbs and reclaiming the shaggy tall lawn.
Seasons change as the empty unloved, unheated neglected Maine home deteriorates and slides further downhill into decay.
Eventually a licensed Maine real estate agent or appraiser roams through the property making notes on a clipboard.
Bids for repairs or sold pretty much as is, where is. It’s like real estate triage for this particular Maine local market.
Not one size fits all on how to approach getting the foreclosure back into the real estate market housing inventory.
Many need more than DIY skills and rehab loans are more lengthy but rewarding to see a house on the brink of disaster pulled back from being
smashed down and loaded into a dump truck to be hauled away.
Those house lots look like missing teeth in a Maine community.
The what should the bank or government agency list the property for number is arrived at and getting the foreclosure on the market happens.
When the bank that made the loan is in Maine, the pulling it back out of the fire can be sped up because everything is local.
The circles are smaller, a few phone calls or emails can make such a difference.
Local Maine bank lenders works best all the way around for a slew of reasons.
Local Bank Lenders Work Best In Small Rural Maine Real Estate Markets. – Mooers Realty
The house in Maine where the owner skips town and it’s left empty.
No tenant to use tear gas to remove (I mean serve them with evictions paperwork and start navigating through the legal court process).
Doesn’t the bank lender care or even know payments are not being made?
Big out of state banks have so many foreclosures, are spread all over creation with many departments. Reachable at five and six digit extensions. But good luck tracking down who you need to talk to at the bank or whoever bought up the block of non-performing foreclosure mortgage loans.
It’s like a rudderless ship. No captain, lost at sea and years can fly by that way. So better loan making to reduce the risk of foreclosure. Using local mortgage lenders that are a much bigger help than far away lenders with no connection to the community, county, state.
The foreclosure process eats up a lot of time because it’s a lawsuit with courtrooms, lawyers, judges are involved.
But if less foreclosures happened with tighter local lending underwriting guidelines reforms? Providing more creative loss mitigations options, streamlining the legal process.
And if local banks in the area jumped in to help speed up the foreclosure through short sales.
To incentivize quick bank home sales to quickly return affordable housing stock to the market.
Then foreclosure houses would not stay off line so long and be in better shape to re-cycle. To ease some of the demand for affordable housing.
These days, smart Maine municipalities are speeding up foreclosure on tax acquired properties.
The Maine towns need the cash to fill potholes, pave and snowplow roads, fund education, pay for salaries and infrastructure building repairs.
The lien placed on a Maine home delinquent in real estate tax payments is a ticking bomb. Set to go off and detonate starting eighteen months with no taxes paid and a lien goes on the house title.
The lot, structures become the towns at the end of at least three years of no paid property taxes.
Instead of waiting another year or two or three after that hoping the owner can redeem, those foreclosed properties are now being marketed online and sold to new performing taxpayers.
To get them off the books and tax generating again.
With empty unheated, unoccupied houses, the sooner the better works best.
Like a patient on the operating table, the longer he or she lies there the odds of survival lessen not improve.
The solution to speed up the Maine house mortgage loan or delinquent real estate tax foreclosure process?
Attack the problem from a local level. Maine banks making the original loan have mortgage centers in Vacationland.
Deed in lieu of foreclosure, debt to Maine Care for nursing home debt and delinquent real estate taxes can be debt with locally way way faster than many states and time zones away.
Those Maine foreclosure houses can be the answer to easing affordable housing inventory for folks begging to stop renting, start building ownership equity in their own place.
If the Maine house foreclosure takes 370 days to settle, another 180 days to sell, that is eating up a lot of time. That the Maine house suffers from poor weather and neglect, maybe even vandalism when no one is home. Local remedies to speed up the Maine house foreclosure process are in place.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North Street Houlton Maine 04730 USA