Easy-to-get loans cause thousands to lose homes
Easy money has led to hard times.
The millionaire businessman living in a $5 million Palm Beach Gardens home; a couple’s county-subsidized 3-bedroom, 2-bath slice of suburbia; a Fort Pierce widow struggling to keep her hurricane-damaged house: pre-foreclosure notices have landed on all their doorsteps.
More than $106 million in home loans collapsed in Palm Beach, Martin and St. Lucie counties in the first quarter of this year alone, according to a Palm Beach Post analysis of data collected by RealeSTAT.com, a local commercial firm that gathers foreclosure and default records. A little more than $68 million in mortgages defaulted in the first quarter of 2005.