- April 29, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
To report abandoned homes in your neighborhood, visit cfobonline.com. The full list of empty houses will be provided to the city.
BY WAYNE GRANT | STAFF WRITER
Shannon McLeish walked around a two-block area near her home and found 12 houses that looked abandoned.
“And I live near City Hall,” she said.
So McLeish and others in the Citizens for Ormond Beach civic group have decided to do something about the city's empty-house issue.
"It’s everybody’s problem," said McLeish, a small business owner and former candidate for the Volusia County Council.
The group has launched an email campaign aimed at compiling a comprehensive list of Ormond Beach's abandoned houses. Research will then be conducted on each house to determine its owner, how long it has been vacant, etc.
Rita Press, president of the group, said all submissions are anonymous. To add an address, visit cfobonline.com, click on Ask CFOB/Contact Us and then type the address into the box. When done, click "submit."
“We’ve gotten quite a response,” Press said. “We want to determine if there’s any pattern, any particular bank letting homes languish and so on. ... We’ll have data we can give to the city to see if anything can be done to remedy the situation.”
She suggested stronger ordinances might be necessary, beyond simply making owners keep the grass trimmed.
“You know what happens when a house is locked up for two years,” she said. “There’s mold.”
McLeish suspects many of the houses will turn out to be bank-owned, based on previous research she has done in other areas.
“In Miami and Brevard County, they changed their fee structure and increased code enforcement after they found banks were sitting on (houses),” McLeish said.
Don Burnette, vice president of American Mortgage Loan Services, said some banks don't always complete foreclosures, because they fear foreclosing on every home would cause chaos in the real estate market.
He said even after a foreclosure is complete, they don't always put the house back on the market because they would take a loss if the value has decreased.
A spokesman for the Florida Bankers Association was not available for comment.
Currently, banks must provide the address of every one of its foreclosed homes to the city. McLeish said there are almost 300 addresses on the city list so far, and she's waiting for her group's research to finish to see if there should be more.
“We need to talk about the problem and get an idea of the scope,” she said.
After the research, the data will be sent to the city of Ormond Beach.
City Manager Joyce Shanahan said she thinks the project is a great idea.
“The difficulty comes when homes are in preforeclosure or when individuals walk away, and banks haven’t yet begun the foreclosure process,” Shanahan said in an email.
She hopes that identifying specific properties that “languish in the foreclosure process” may encourage individuals or banks to maintain them.
“We will (also) research what other communities are doing,” Shanahan said.
Press said the city needs a clear picture of why so many houses are empty. In her research so far, she has found that some vacant houses are owned by people in other states.
Even if a house is in good shape, she added, it should be reported on the Citizens for Ormond Beach website.
“We need to have information before we go forward with a remedy,” she said.
