Foreclosed houses boost existing-home sales in Orlando area [Central Florida]

Foreclosed houses boost existing-home sales in Orlando area [Central Florida]

Darhlene Zeanwick is in the thick of the region’s record blizzard of home foreclosures, brokering sales for banks and helping prospective buyers look for bargains.

“About 38 percent of all homes on the market for sale in Poinciana are in some state of foreclosure, such as short sales and bank-owned properties,” the Osceola County real-estate agent said recently.

Orlando’s existing-home sales were up in September and October compared with a year earlier, ending 27 consecutive months of decline. That’s the good news. The bad news: A lot of those sales involved homes repossessed by banks or caught in some stage of foreclosure.

How many? No one is really sure. The Orlando Regional Realtor Association, for instance, only recently began tagging foreclosed properties in its giant Multiple Listings Service database.

Meet the competition

Meet the competition

Shielded from the equatorial sun beneath an umbrella, Jim and Carol Lynch reflect on their unusual decision to move from the small town of Fayetteville, Tenn., to a suburb of this Costa Rican capital.

“Look around you, man,” Jim Lynch says. “This place is beautiful.”

They are among a small but growing cadre of baby boomers for whom Latin American countries with communities catering to gringos are becoming the new Florida, or at least, what Florida meant to previous generations.

From the 1950s through the ’90s, for many retirees, Florida was just a given — the place you moved to at a certain age to enjoy a daily dose of sunshine, a cheap house with palm trees and a pool, low taxes, plentiful local food, and a light-hearted sense of adventure.

Trading Down Is the New Real Estate Reality

Trading Down Is the New Real Estate Reality

Half a million dollars is, by almost any standard, a lot of money. But during the past few years, when credit was easy and regulations were loose, to many Americans it didn’t seem like all that much.

That’s because they were able to borrow huge amounts of money to buy new homes, often with little or nothing down. And while most homes sold in the U.S., even at the height of the housing bubble, were $500,000 or less, rising prices in most major cities and affluent suburbs around the country pushed the cost of a three-bedroom home well into seven figures or more.

In fact, in most parts of the country $500,000 has always bought plenty of house. But the gap between $500,000 and $1 million is more than monetary. It is also psychological. And during the recent boom years Americans became reckless consumers, buying cars, houses, clothes and much more that they couldn’t really afford. The dream of a $1 million home, once so distant, became tantalizingly reachable.

Now that’s all changed. While certain pockets, such as Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston, remain high compared with the rest of the U.S., real estate prices around the country have fallen dramatically. The downside to this, of course, is that many people now owe more money on their homes than their homes are worth. The upside is that valuations are much more realistic—and affordable.

Joe Adams: Law says very little about association board decisions by e-mail

Joe Adams: Law says very little about association board decisions by e-mail

Q: Please advise as to what decisions our association board members can make by e-mail. C.M. (via e-mail)

A: Obviously, e-mail has become a permanent part of our society’s way of communicating with each other.

Unfortunately, the laws for community associations do not react well to technology. The only provisions regarding electronic communications currently found in the community association statutes provide that owners in condominium and homeowners’ associations can waive the right to receive printed/mailed notice of certain association meetings, and instead consent to receive those meeting notices by e-mail. There is no provision in the law for the owner to interact back with the association through electronic media, such as electronic voting.

Home values falling less sharply than prices

Home values falling less sharply than prices

San Diego home prices have been falling for three years as sellers facing financial distress accept lower offers from bargain-hunting buyers. But the course of home values tells a slightly different story.

Zillow.com, a Seattle-based Web site that follows the housing market nationally, released figures yesterday that illustrate the gap between prices and what it estimates as the true value of homes.

The company found that values have fallen 17.9 percent in the past year in San Diego County, while the median price was off 27.2 percent over the same period, as measured by San Diego-based MDA DataQuick.

The reason for such a gap: More than a third of homes sold over the past year previously went through foreclosure and fetched below-market prices when compared with nonforeclosure properties.

Playing with fire: Foreclosures bring rise in uninsured tenants

Playing with fire: Foreclosures bring rise in uninsured tenants

It was force of habit that pushed Jeanne Ryan out of her home on a Sunday afternoon in January, just like everybody else at Indian Village Condominiums.

The fire alarm went off.

But she didn’t bother to take her purse, much less her television and furniture.

“We just all proceeded outside thinking it was a false alarm. Well, surely it was not,” Ryan recalled. “You think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be a small fire, and it’s going to go out.’