Cleveland pre foreclosure homes are getting the attention of the Ohio Housing Finance Agency and Cincinnati-based American Homeowner Preservation.
The HFA has started crafting a special program to help unemployed homeowners after the state of Ohio received $172 million from the Obama administration for its statewide foreclosure prevention programs.
The AHP, meanwhile, will start holding information sessions for its foreclosure prevention program in Cleveland this April. The AHP program focuses on distressed borrowers who owe more than the values of their homes. Under the AHP scheme, homeowners sell their homes and then lease them back. They are also given the chance to buy back their homes at prices much below the amounts of their original mortgages.
Jorge Newbery, director of AHP, said that the AHP scheme is a solution fair to all parties of the mortgage contract. Distressed families are able to stay in their houses, lenders receive payments for the loans they provided, and neighborhoods do not get overloaded with abandoned bank-owned homes.
Newbery added that the AHP scheme is timely as there are now over 7.6 million underwater borrowers across the country, about 37 percent of the 20.8 million mortgage borrowers nationwide. The Cleveland information event in April will enable AHP to help reduce the number of Cleveland pre foreclosure homes.
In 2009, the pace of foreclosures in Cleveland slowed down by 19 percent both from 2008 and from 2007, but the total number of filings still reached 22,430, which was a relatively large number compared to filings in other metro areas.
The Cleveland metro area ranked 59th in a listing of 203 large metro areas based on foreclosure percentages in 2009. People who have pursued their plan to purchase foreclosed homes listings can search properties in the Cleveland area as the inventory of foreclosed homes in the area is still substantial.
Foreclosure activity statewide also resurged in February after declining in January. A total of 11,286 foreclosures were filed in Ohio in February, in addition to the 11,105 foreclosures posted in January.
According to Ohio Governor Ted Strickland and Senators Sherrod Brown and George Voinovich, the federal money allocated to the state will help a large number of Ohio homeowners keep their homes in the midst of one of the worst recessions the country had ever experienced.
With the determination of officials leading the HFA and AHP, it is hoped that the number of Cleveland pre foreclosure homes declines in the coming months.