First, County Treasurer Rokakis has proposed a Cuyahoga County Land Bank. This idea is supposed to help with the vacant property issues that arose mostly due to the foreclosure/predatory lending issues here. The PD’s Mark Gillespie did a story on it yesterday (I couldn’t post to Word Press for some reason yesterday but it’s working today). The article is here. Rokakis’ idea is apparently modeled after one used in the Flint Michigan/Genesee County area. They established a land bank in 2002 so they have a few years of stats under their belt. Genesee County says they are collecting over a million dollars from sales and delinquent tax collections each yr due to their land bank. What do you think of this idea?
Cleveland, btw, already has a land bank. But the land is sold when it’s vacant. The new idea for the County Bank would allow for dwellings to be on the property that could be rehabilitated.
The second story is about Ohio’s Foreclosure Prevention Task Force. I posted about it before and now Lou Tisler has sent us an update. There was a compact entered into between the State of Ohio and nine mortgage service providers. Why are there not more? I guess we will take the nine! There seem to be some big names missing. Anyway, I’m going to list all nine here: CITI, Carrington Mortgage Services, GMAC, HSBC, Litton Loan Servicing, Ocwen Financial, Option One Mortgage, Saxon Mortgage, and Select Portfolio. Granted, I am only one agent, but some of these have never crossed my radar. It does include all of Ohio however.
What have they agreed to do? You can read about it in it’s entirety on the Dept of Commerce site. Here are some highlights:
1. Willingly participate in a loan program to provide better rates to substantial amounts of borrowers who have ARM resets (existing or coming).
2. Work with ‘at risk’ borrowers before it becomes too late to try to rectify the situation.
3. Create staff incentives for newer loans/adjustments, instead of incentives for foreclosing. (I admit I do not know if they have incentives to foreclose but I know this incentive program reminds me of creditors who call and try to get you to make payments on the phone….they get a commission on that kind of money collected. This effort seems a tad more noble).
4. The ‘non-binding’ agreements extend to June of 2009. I guess it’s the equivalent of a gentleman’s agreement.
Peace Out – 3C
Update: Gloria Ferris is a thoughtful blogger and her first hand visit to the City Club this week to actually hear what Treasurer Rokakis had to say in person and it lent itself to a very good post you can read here.
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1 County Comissioners Support Land Bank Idea….Probably // Dec 4, 2008 at 9:09 pm
[...] They try to do that on a more local level as well. First the issue: whether or not to have a Cuyahoga County Land Bank, so the County could purchase foreclosed properties or have them donated to them by the [...]
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