News About Properties

Is Save Our Homes Portability Selling Houses? [Tampa Bay Area]

Raymond McIntyre’s office generated an interesting set of numbers this week: 222 people have moved to Highlands County, and brought their Save Our Homes tax exemptions with them.

Just 75 homeowners left the county, and applied to transfer their Save Our Homes elsewhere in Florida. Net gain: about three to one, said McIntyre, Highlands County’s property appraiser.

So, three real estate agents and brokers were asked, are people moving to Highlands County because they can buy a cheaper home, with lower taxes?

When people buy a home, they can apply for a $50,000 homestead exemption. If their home costs $100,000, the homestead exemption allows them to pay taxes on $50,000 instead.

Neighbors Are Left With A Mess [Tampa Bay Area]

Robert Ramirez awoke in the middle of the night to clanging metal and a rumbling moving truck in the back yard next door.

Evicted neighbors loaded their belongings and fled the two-story stucco home. They left doors and windows open, and trash and debris strewn across the lawn. It has been eight weeks, and no one has shown up to take care of it.

“This used to be a really nice, close-knit community,” Ramirez said, standing on his dark green lawn framed by lush plants. “Now, with that house here, there’s no way I could sell my house. I’m stuck, and my property value is falling.”

During the worst wave of foreclosures in U.S. history, the Riverview subdivision of Lakeside is a microcosm of the problems felt by hundreds of other Bay area communities.

Lawsuit pits 2 Gumbergs against brother

A feud splitting one of Pittsburgh’s best-known real estate families went public this week as Andrew and Lawrence Gumberg filed a lawsuit accusing their older brother Ira of misappropriating millions from joint holdings worth $500 million.

The two younger Gumbergs claim Ira Gumberg and Braddock Hills-based J.J. Gumberg Co., a company founded by their grandfather, misappropriated “at least $13.5 million” belonging to Gumberg family partnerships from 2000 to 2007. Of that amount, “at least $4.7 million has been improperly withheld” from Andrew and Lawrence Gumberg, the suit states, and the brothers “believe and aver that the actual losses are substantially greater.”

Ira Gumberg, J.J. Gumberg’s president and chief executive officer, could not be reached for comment but privately held J.J. Gumberg issued a release referring to the younger brothers as “two disgruntled partners” who “believe they can force a buyout of their interests on their terms through a lawsuit.”

Andrew and Lawrence Gumberg could not be reached for comment. Both work for separate real estate companies in Florida and Pittsburgh. Their lawyer also declined comment.

Banks in Jeopardy

Tens of millions of dollars in loans have gone bad at Southwest Florida banks during the real estate slump.

Are those banks ready to handle them?

Federal regulators are worried that some banks in Florida and across the nation may be ill-prepared to deal with their battered loan business.

U.S. banks have set aside just 89 cents to cover every $1 in nonperforming loans, or loans that borrowers are no longer paying off, said Sheila Bair, chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Can Son Co-Own And Rent Florida Condo?

Q: I’m planning on acquiring rental property and my son is looking for a primary residence, so I’m going to buy a condo or villa in Florida and rent it to him. To attain owner-occupancy status, I intend to put both our names on the mortgage as Tenants-in-Common. Can I claim all his payment as rent, thereby, making him a tenant? Is it acceptable to rent to him for the total mortgage payment?

–Anthony McCoy, Indianapolis, Ind.

A: Yes, your son can be both a co-owner of a property as well as a tenant, and you can charge him the amount of the mortgage as rent. But whether or not this is the best situation in this circumstance depends on what each of you is trying to achieve.

Chapter 13 standoff thwarts foreclosure on St. Petersburg house for years [Tampa Bay Area]

With the economy tumbling, thousands of Floridians have filed bankruptcies in a last-ditch bid to keep their homes from foreclosure.

Among them was 55-year-old Rose King. In the end, she was unable to save her home, but it certainly wasn’t for lack of trying.

Between 1999 and last January, King filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection eight times — a move that kept lenders from forcing the sale of her St. Petersburg bungalow. And when she finally moved out in March, she took everything, including the kitchen sink.

“She lived two years for free, I can tell you that,” says Kelly Goff, who held the most recent mortgage and had to schedule foreclosure sales four times. “I’ve never had anything like it, and I’ve had hundreds of loans. It’s luck of the draw that I happened to get somebody who knew how to abuse the system and used it.”