By Michael Pollick, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
Tom Waters of Coldwell Banker has become a specialist in selling properties taken over by the lender. Last week, he was checking up on a Whitfield Country Club Estates home, north of Sarasota, after his crew had changed the locks. As usual, he said, the pool was green.
If no-money-down was the real estate password for the first half of the 2000s, “jingle-mail” might be the word for rest of it. It is real estate agent jargon for property owners, unable or unwilling to pay their mortgages, sending the house keys to the bank, giving up their homes.
Bank-owned properties have become the hot new field in residential real estate, as the excesses of 2004-06 come home to roost. The need for players is growing rapidly along with Southwest Florida’s spiking foreclosures.
For 2007, 142 properties out of 6,188 sales were officially tagged as being distressed in the Sarasota Multiple Listing Service for a rate of 2.3 percent. But the number of homes swelled to 8.1 percent in January, 8.7 percent in February and 10 percent last month, says Jose Lopez, a distressed-property specialist with Rose Bay Realty who is tracking the phenomenon.
“It keeps growing and growing and growing,” Lopez said. Even the incomplete month of April already is higher than that for all of 2007. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up this year at six to seven times the amount of these type of properties that were sold last year.”
