From the Press of Atlantic City:
Foreclosures piling up with family debt
The region is seeing more sheriff’s sales. New Jersey is leading the Northeast in the number of foreclosures, according to the real-estate advisory firm Foreclosures.com. The firm said New Jersey has seen 23,272 foreclosures so far this year, or about 63 percent more than all of last year.
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Relatively few of these homes wind up for sale in county courthouses, Cape May County Sheriff John Callinan said. “So much goes on behind the scenes. The banks negotiate and try to work things out,” he said.His office has sold 114 Cape May County properties at auction through November compared with 95 all of last year and 91 in 2004. Ocean County, too, has seen more auctions: 150 so far compared with just 99 in all of 2005. In Cumberland County, auctions were up slightly over last year.
Callinan said wildly fluctuating numbers make it hard to gauge trends. But one thing is constant. Each auctioned property has its own story, he said. Occasionally, the property owners attend the auction in the hope that the bid price will exceed the amount owed. Any surplus usually goes to the property owner.
“It’s tragic. Some of them have just given up. People sometimes are working on slippery sands. It’s a sad thing,” he said.
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The downturn in the real-estate market has scared off most speculative investors at sheriff’s sales.“It went from competitive to cutthroat. Now the market is starting to drop down,” he said. “Almost all of the properties we’ve sold have gone back to the bank or lender. The local investors are holding off until values level off. Then they’ll start picking them up.”