Civil Courts are Clogged by Staggering Number of Foreclosures

October 28th, 2009

None involved in a foreclosure ever want to go anywhere near the process once again – not the borrowers, or lenders or the judges presiding over the cases. The civil courts are clogged with staggering number of foreclosures.

In Midami-Dade, Monroe and Broward counties are sitting on 135,000 foreclosures this year as compared to 17,500 in 2006. It has been a veritable avalanche. The owners of the homes are hanging in a state of limbo. Banks are not getting their regular payments and the snowballing effect is felt by all from condo associations to the local government that are failing to collect dues. The government on the other hand is having to spend extra funds for the safety of abandoned houses.

Judge Jennifer D. Bailey (11th Judicial Circuit) said, “Everybody’s getting burned in this thing. The bank’s not going to come out of this in one piece. The people, who owned the property, whether they’re homeowners or investors, are not going to come out in one piece.”

Even the courts are straining not to crumble apart as the foreclosures are crowding the calendar of the judges who has to deal with other cases also like traffic, wills etc. Bailey said, “We’re sort of built to handle 25,000 to 35,000 cases a year. We have almost 35,000 by the end of June that are foreclosures alone, out of a total of 50,000 cases filed.”

In Florida State 17% of over 3.5 million mortgages are in some stage of foreclosure. It is the highest in the country according to report on the second quarter released by Mortgage Bankers Association. Previously foreclosure cases took three or five months to run its course. But now it takes nine months for it to move starting from the date of initial filing to the time of the foreclosure auction. The system now resembles a monopoly game that has gone wrong. If a court date is missed or an auction cancelled then the process goes back by three months to start from scratch.

The problem is not related to volume alone. There is a maze of rules that vary from one judicial circuit to another. This causes confusion among the plaintiffs. Many of the borrowers have taken the help of AWOL that compels the lenders to follow the path of methods that consume more time.

Even in normal times foreclosures involve piles of paperwork. In times of crisis it has become even more cumbersome.