Tax credit expiration and negative sentiment weigh on Q3 home prices

Posted on November 15, 2010 by grim

From the WSJ:

Home Prices Decline in Nearly Half of Metropolitan Areas

Home prices fell in nearly half of U.S. metropolitan areas in the third quarter, indicating that the market is losing steam without government tax credits, according to an industry report.

The median price for home resales fell compared with last year in 76 out of 155 areas tracked by the National Association of Realtors, the trade group said Thursday. Prices rose in 77 areas and were unchanged in two.

In the second quarter of the year, prices rose in nearly two-thirds of U.S. cities.

The national median price for single-family homes, however, was nearly unchanged. It was $177,900 in the July-September quarter, down 0.2% from a year earlier.
…
The government sparked a surge in home sales at the start of the year by providing tax credits of up to $8,000, mainly for first-time owners. But since they expired, sales have slumped despite the lowest mortgage rates in decades.

Home sales in the third quarter were down 25% from the second quarter, and down 21% from a year earlier, the Realtors group said.

The weak economy has kept buyers on the sidelines. Plus, uncertainty over the extent to which banks filed fraudulent foreclosure documents has caused some buyers to shy away from foreclosed properties.
…
Several lenders have stopped seizing properties over the past six weeks to fix document flaws.Once banks resolve those problems, analysts expect foreclosures to climb again. “Foreclosure sales are going to increase into next year, which will cause prices to decline further,” said Celia Chen, a senior director with Moody’s Analytics.
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Nationwide, “distressed property,” including foreclosures and homes at risk of foreclosure, accounted for 34% of third-quarter transactions, up from 30% a year earlier, the Realtors estimated.

Posted in Economics, National Real Estate | 92 Comments

Owning homes losing appeal for boomers? Uh oh.

Posted on November 14, 2010 by grim

From the NY Times:

Demand Grows for Over-55 Rentals

“IT used to be your home was your castle,” said Lisa Kelly, who manages several rental complexes for people 55 and over. “Nowadays nobody wants a castle, or a mortgage — especially if you are older.”

But in this postrecession era, there are indications of a growing market for 55-and-over rental complexes, particularly ones that price their rents at the lower end.

At Waterside Villas in Monroe, monthly rents for one-bedroom apartments start at $1,200, and utilities, shuttle bus service, a concierge and activities are included. According to Ms. Kelly, who works for Kohl Asset Management, the pace of leasing at Waterside has been up sharply since January.
…
Although the pace of leasing is also up at some higher-priced buildings, including Heritage Pointe of Teaneck, which her company manages for another owner, Ms. Kelly said the trend had been more distinct at Waterside.

Set in a working-class community in Middlesex County, Waterside attracts a majority of its residents from the surrounding area, and about a third of them are still working, she said. The average age is comparatively young — many are in their late 50s and early 60s — and there are 19 couples.
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The New Jersey housing market analyst Jeffrey G. Otteau has pretty much sounded a dirge for “active senior” condos, calculating an inventory build-up that would take more than 13 years to sell. He said that demand for rentals was likely to grow, but only if they were priced somewhere below $1,500 a month.

“The market for senior rentals will be extremely price-sensitive going forward,” he said, “and projects that are near transportation and job centers will do best.”

Members of the baby boom generation are realizing they are going to have to work “an extra 10 years” past 62, said Mr. Otteau, whose appraisal company, the Otteau Valuation Group, is based in New Brunswick. “They will be seeking communities that are located well, convenient to shopping and affordable for them, whatever their income might be,” he said.
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“The majority of seniors are moving from homes they have owned for 30 or 40 years, where the mortgage was paid off long ago,” Mr. Uranowitz said. “If they are able to sell in this market, they won’t get what the house was worth at the peak, but what they get is free and clear. They become solid, reliable renters. ”

More and more people are living longer, and staying healthier. Some rental projects, like Heritage Pointe, offer doctors’ offices on site, even if “assisted living” is not part of the amenities package.

This means that older renters can stay in place longer, Mr. Otteau added, and that the tenant base becomes more stable.

Posted in Economics, National Real Estate | 26 Comments

Housing’s Handcuffs

Posted on November 12, 2010 by grim

From HousingWire:

Recession forced homeowners to stay put, Cleveland economist says

More homeowners are staying in their homes longer because of the struggling economy, according to Daniel Hartley, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. Hartley cited 2009 data from the U.S. Census Bureau that showed a steady increase in the percentage of people who live in the same house as they did a year ago, from just below 84% in 2005 up to 85.5% in 2009.

The percentage of people living in a different state between the same time period decreased, from approximately 2.5% in 2005 to below 2.1% in 2009.

Hartley said these correlated patterns are referred to as the “spatial lock-in” phenomenon. For example, higher foreclosures obviously make it less likely that people will be living in the same place they were a year ago. But, spatial lock-in occurs when conditions, such as unwillingness to strategically default on the mortgage or an inability to sell the home, physically prevent a homeowner from considering moving to a new location.

Hartley found that, over the past decade, homeowner moving patterns — including spatial lock-in — have fluctuated simultaneously with economic stability. In 2001, the percentage of people living in the same house spiked to nearly 85% and remained at an elevated level throughout the early 2000s recession. At that time, the percentage of people who lived in a different state than they did one year ago dropped from 2.75% to 2.2% by 2003.

Posted in Economics, Housing Bubble, National Real Estate | 203 Comments

“Because in America, it’s far more shameful to owe money than it is to steal it.”

Posted on November 11, 2010 by grim

From the Rolling Stone:

Matt Taibbi: Courts Helping Banks Screw Over Homeowners

The foreclosure lawyers down in Jacksonville had warned me, but I was skeptical. They told me the state of Florida had created a special super-high-speed housing court with a specific mandate to rubber-stamp the legally dicey foreclosures by corporate mortgage pushers like Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase. This “rocket docket,” as it is called in town, is presided over by retired judges who seem to have no clue about the insanely complex financial instruments they are ruling on — securitized mortgages and laby­rinthine derivative deals of a type that didn’t even exist when most of them were active members of the bench. Their stated mission isn’t to decide right and wrong, but to clear cases and blast human beings out of their homes with ultimate velocity. They certainly have no incentive to penetrate the profound criminal mysteries of the great American mortgage bubble of the 2000s, perhaps the most complex Ponzi scheme in human history — an epic mountain range of corporate fraud in which Wall Street megabanks conspired first to collect huge numbers of subprime mortgages, then to unload them on unsuspecting third parties like pensions, trade unions and insurance companies (and, ultimately, you and me, as taxpayers) in the guise of AAA-rated investments. Selling lead as gold, shit as Chanel No. 5, was the essence of the booming international fraud scheme that created most all of these now-failing home mortgages.

The rocket docket wasn’t created to investigate any of that. It exists to launder the crime and bury the evidence by speeding thousands of fraudulent and predatory loans to the ends of their life cycles, so that the houses attached to them can be sold again with clean paperwork. The judges, in fact, openly admit that their primary mission is not justice but speed. One Jacksonville judge, the Honorable A.C. Soud, even told a local newspaper that his goal is to resolve 25 cases per hour. Given the way the system is rigged, that means His Honor could well be throwing one ass on the street every 2.4 minutes.

Foreclosure lawyers told me one other thing about the rocket docket. The hearings, they said, aren’t exactly public. “The judges might give you a hard time about watching,” one lawyer warned. “They’re not exactly anxious for people to know about this stuff.” Inwardly, I laughed at this — it sounded like typical activist paranoia. The notion that a judge would try to prevent any citizen, much less a member of the media, from watching an open civil hearing sounded ridiculous. Fucked-up as everyone knows the state of Florida is, it couldn’t be that bad. It isn’t Indonesia. Right?

Posted in Foreclosures, Housing Bubble, National Real Estate | 180 Comments

“The length and depth of the current housing recession is rivaling the Great Depression”

Posted on November 10, 2010 by grim

From Portfolio:

Housing: Bleaker, not Better

Talk about bad news for the thousands of small businesses and entrepreneurs dependent on housing and the millions of others indirectly affected by the housing market. In Zillow.com’s latest survey on the state of the U.S. housing market, the situation can be summed up in one word—lousy.

The housing slump, the online real estate company reports today, isn’t only reaching levels not seen for 80 years, it’s actually expected to surpass them.

“While not unexpected, the unceasing declines in home values signal that we’re in for a long, bleak winter of continued troubles for the housing market,” Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries, said in a release. “The length and depth of the current housing recession is rivaling the Great Depression’s real estate downturn, and, with encouraging signs fading, will easily eclipse it in the coming months.”

More people are upside down on their mortgages, foreclosures are on the rise, and housing prices continue to fall in just about every one of the top 25 metropolitan markets.
…
“The high percentage of homeowners in negative equity continues to be troubling, in that it represents a huge number of people who are not only more vulnerable to foreclosure, but who are essentially trapped in their current homes and are prevented from selling and buying a new home. This has profound implications for future demand and will be a millstone around the neck of the housing market,” Humphries said.

Posted in Economics, Foreclosures, Housing Bubble | 167 Comments

“[I]n the end it comes down to supply and demand.”

Posted on November 9, 2010 by grim

From CNBC:

Three F’s in Housing Spell Trouble

Now that we’ve gotten the Q3 reports from Fannie, Freddie and the FHA, the picture of housing’s future is becoming ever clearer.

The combined Real Estate Owned (REO) inventory of the three rose 24 percent quarter to quarter and 93 percent year over year.

In real numbers, at the end of Q3 there were a record 293,171 REO’s sitting on their books. This of course doesn’t count REO held by the banks and private label securities. That’s up from 153,007 at the end of Q3 2009.

Granted, the GSE’s and FHA have disposed of (sold) an awful lot of properties. In the first 9 months of this year they’ve sold over 200,000, but that still leaves us, net, with the above numbers, which are also rising at a fast clip.
…
So why am I bombarding you with all these numbers? Because as I have always said, over and over, housing’s recovery is based almost entirely on inventory.

We can talk prices, affordability, confidence, foreclosures, scandals, politics, whatever you want, but in the end it comes down to supply and demand.

We are looking at a ballooning supply coupled with dwindling demand. You do the math.

Posted in Economics, Housing Bubble, National Real Estate | 148 Comments

Again regulators drop the ball

Posted on November 8, 2010 by grim

From the Washington Post:

Regulators lagged in foreclosure oversight

As foreclosures began to mount across the country three years ago, a group of state bank regulators suspected that some borrowers might be losing their homes unnecessarily. So the state officials asked the biggest national banks for details about their foreclosure operations.

When two banks – J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo – declined to cooperate, the state officials asked the banks’ federal regulator for help, according to a letter they sent. But the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which oversees national banks, denied the states’ request, saying the firms should answer only to inquiries from federal officials. In a response to state officials, John Dugan, comptroller at the time, wrote that his agency was already planning to collect foreclosure information and that any additional monitoring risked “confusing matters.”

But even as it closed the door on state oversight, the OCC chose itself not to scrutinize the foreclosure operations of the largest national banks, forgoing any examination of their procedures and paperwork. Instead, the agency relied on the banks’ in-house assessments. These provided no hint of the problems to come until they had tripped the nation’s housing market, agency officials later acknowledged.
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Even when the mortgage industry itself identified possible flaws in foreclosure paperwork, the agency was slow to act. In September, Ally Financial suspended foreclosures after discovering problems with tens of thousands of cases. But even then, the OCC did not begin to examine the operations of other major banks. Instead, the agency asked them to undertake internal reviews and told them it would conduct its own examination later, an OCC official said.
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The OCC is one of the nation’s four federal bank regulators and has primary oversight over the largest banks, while the other three – the Federal Reserve, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Office of Thrift Supervision – share responsibility for many small and medium-size financial firms. All the agencies failed to spot problems in the foreclosure process.

Posted in Foreclosures, National Real Estate | 150 Comments

Death and Taxes

Posted on November 7, 2010 by grim

From the Record:

North Jersey property taxes rising, again

The typical North Jersey homeowner will pay about $375 more in property taxes over the next year — and will get less for the money in many cases, as communities scale back services.

Tax bills will rise by 4.1 percent, to $9,053, for the typical home in Bergen County and by 5.6 percent, to $8,190, in Passaic County, according to an analysis by The Record.

Residents are shouldering a larger share of the cost to run schools and local and county governments, due to a significant drop in state aid and other revenue, officials said. At the same time, many communities have laid off employees, instituted hiring freezes or cut programs.

“It’s a double whammy,” said William Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities.

Residents in many of the region’s lower-income communities were hit with the largest increases.

In the city of Passaic, where 18 police jobs have been eliminated, residents will see a 12.4 percent spike The typical tax hike in Saddle Brook, which laid off five public works employees, will be 7.2 percent. And in Paterson, which put in place employee furloughs, homeowners will pay 9.7 percent more this year.

Meanwhile, Tenafly, Allendale, Palisades Park, Teaneck and Fairview all kept the median tax bill from growing by more than 2 percent.

Local officials said the rise was largely due to factors out of their control: a drop in state aid and increases in health insurance premiums, energy costs and required contributions to the state pension system.

“This is the most difficult time I’ve seen in local government,” said Stephen LoIacono, city manager in Hackensack. “People are angry. It seems like people are demanding more services. The economy is bad, people are losing jobs, people are losing their homes and this is another piece of the pressure people feel.”

Posted in New Jersey Real Estate, Property Taxes | 136 Comments

Restarting the machine

Posted on November 5, 2010 by grim

From the NY Observer:

JPMorgan to Get Back in the Foreclosure Business

“We’re not evicting people who deserve to stay in their house,” JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said in mid-October on his company’s third-quarter earnings conference call. Now it appears as though the company is now willing to act on Dimon’s convictions. Reuters reports that the bank’s retail financial services chief, Charlie Scharf, told analysts today that the bank will be plowing forward on foreclosure proceedings in the next few weeks.

Scharf said that JPMorgan had stopped its foreclosure processes to review paperwork on some 127,000 loans in 40 states, and after implementing some new foreclosure procedures is now set to resume repossessions of homes from delinquent borrowers.

On the Oct. 13 earnings call, JPMorgan acknowledged that employees charged with signing mortgage affidavits had not always reviewed the underlying loans governing the documents. The company nevertheless expressed confidence in its procedures, despite a joint investigation into the matter by attorneys general hailing from all 50 states in the union. “Maybe we will have to pay penalties from the AGs eventually, but we think we should just continue” he said.

Posted in Foreclosures, National Real Estate | 203 Comments

Redefining Luxury

Posted on November 4, 2010 by grim

From the Montclair Times:

Condo owners allege Siena has structural ‘defects’

Raniya Kassem owns a condominium on the fifth floor of Montclair’s luxury high-rise complex The Siena, but it’s been about a year and five months since she has resided there.

Kassem said she moved out of the South Park Street building on May 12, 2009, on the advice of an expert who tested the air in her condo and discovered mold spores. The mold had grown in the cavity of her bedroom wall as a result of persistent water leaks in her brand-new dwelling unit, Kassem said.

The leaks were discovered long before she packed her bags and left. Two days after she bought the 962-square-foot condo for $441,000 on July 22, 2008, Kassem discovered “a huge bubble in my ceiling in the bathroom” and her condo’s windowsills were wet. Later she would also find water had saturated one bedroom wall.
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Eventually, Kassem, 37, started feeling ill, experiencing respiratory symptoms and developing rashes. She began to use an inhaler. Then one day she called in an environmental testing service to evaluate the air quality in her room and she learned about the mold. The consultant advised her to sleep elsewhere until the problem was remediated.

“I left that night to live with my parents” in Roseland, she said. After three weeks passed and Kassem retained an attorney, she moved back into The Siena, with the developers agreeing to put her up in another condo on the fifth floor.

But when that unit sold, they moved Kassem again — this time to a unit on the seventh floor.

“I bought a home and I don’t have a home,” she said. “I have a closet full of stuff I never unpacked.

“I am a first-time homebuyer and man, this has not been a pleasant experience at all. You think about the American dream of owning your own home. After buying at The Siena, I don’t believe in that anymore. It has been nothing but heartache for me.”

Her neighbors on the building’s fifth floor, Vin Forbes and Carlton Schultz, have a similar story.

Forbes said he and his partner moved into their unit, for which they paid $616,900, at the end of January 2008. Weeks later, on Feb. 14, he notified the building’s management of water leaks inside his new two-bedroom condominium. Work crews arrived.

Posted in New Development, New Jersey Real Estate | 193 Comments

533 Days…

Posted on November 2, 2010 by grim

From Lender Processing Service:

LPS Mortgage Monitor – October 2010 Mortgage Performance Observations

Posted in Foreclosures, New Jersey Real Estate, Risky Lending | 166 Comments

Fitch: 40 months to clear shadow inventory, home prices to fall additional 10%

Posted on November 2, 2010 by grim

From HousingWire:

Foreclosure shadow inventory will take more than 40 months to clear: Fitch

The shadow inventory of delinquent loans, foreclosures, and REOs stands at 7 million homes, which would take the market more than 40 months to clear, more than three years, according to Fitch Ratings.

And as major banks fix recent problems in the foreclosure process, that number will only grow. Liquidation and resolution timelines were extended because of the affidavit issues. Consumer advocacy groups and state attorneys general offices filed lawsuits, and regulators launched investigations.

All of it, Fitch said, simply prolonged the housing correction underway and will bring about further house price declines and losses on residential mortgage-backed securities.
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Analysts did say it is still unclear how long the foreclosure delay will last, but even before the problems came to light, Fitch believed prices would drop another 10% with the majority of the recovery coming at the end of 2012.

Posted in Economics, Housing Bubble, National Real Estate | 136 Comments

A different kind of stimulus

Posted on November 1, 2010 by grim

From the WSJ:

The Stealth Stimulus of Defaulters Living for Free

The mortgage-foreclosure mess could prove expensive for banks and investors. But in some states, it will also prolong an unintended economic stimulus: free housing for millions of defaulters.

Across the U.S., banks are running into problems foreclosing on homes because of flaws in their paperwork. Their main transgression involves the use of so-called robo-signers, bank employees who signed foreclosure affidavits without properly checking the required loan documentation. Major loan servicers—including Bank of America Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Ally Financial Inc.’s GMAC Mortgage—have at least temporarily stopped some foreclosure sales as state attorneys general probe their practices and loan servicers check to make sure their papers are in order.

The problems will be expensive for banks, and for investors in mortgage bonds, in terms of added processing costs and lost interest income. But for the millions of U.S. homeowners who have stopped making mortgage payments or who are already in the foreclosure process, the upshot is that they’ll get to stay in their homes a bit longer. Given that they’re not paying rent, that time has value.

Defaulters living in their homes are getting a subsidy worth about $2.6 billion a month, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on mortgage data from LPS Applied Analytics and rent data from the Commerce Department. That’s 0.25% of U.S. personal income, roughly equivalent to the benefit top earners receive from Bush-era tax breaks.

The longer defaulters stay in their homes, the longer the stimulus lasts. The average borrower whose home is in the foreclosure process hasn’t made a payment in nearly 16 months, according to LPS.

In most places, the foreclosure delays are unlikely to amount to more than a couple more months of free rent, says Ivy Zelman, chief executive of housing-market consultancy Zelman & Associates. But she says it could be six or more months in states such as Florida and New York, where the legal bottlenecks are most severe.

“In places where people get an extra month or two, it probably doesn’t have much effect,” Ms. Zelman says. “But in states where it lasts longer, it’s probably stimulative.”

Posted in Housing Bubble, National Real Estate, Risky Lending | 154 Comments

1991 all over again

Posted on October 30, 2010 by grim

Homework for the weekend, compare and contrast the market in 1991 and the market in 2010.

From the NY Times:

Jersey’s ‘Gold Coast’ Losing Its Glitter
By THOMAS J. LUECK
Published: March 24, 1991

THE New Jersey shore of the Hudson River, which emerged in the mid-80’s as a powerful new magnet for high-rise office development, is struggling with high vacancy rates, canceled projects and nagging doubts about the capacity of its roads, parking and public transportation.

No area better symbolized the 80’s real estate boom in the New York region. An 18-mile corridor of gritty piers, derelict warehouses and abandoned railroad yards, the New Jersey riverfront became a patchwork of huge development sites.

It also became the focus of a feisty battle for New York City tenants and the centerpiece of an urban renaissance so sweeping that some began calling the area the “Gold Coast” of New Jersey.

For now, the renaissance has slowed. With 15 million square feet of space — more than half of it built in the last five years — developers on the New Jersey shore are beset by the highest vacancy rates in the New York area.
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One troubled residential project is Port Liberte, a development that may ultimately include 1,690 town houses and apartments on a series of shorefront canals in Jersey City, just west of the Statue of Liberty. With only 300 of the homes completed, the project’s developer, Paul W. Bucha, president of Port Liberte Partners of Jersey City, ran into severe financial trouble in 1989 and stopped building. One of his major lenders, CityFed Financial Corporation of Somerset, N.J., attributed a loss of $52.7 million to its bad loans to Port Liberte, and its assets were later seized by Federal regulators.

Now, despite widespread reports that Asian investors stand ready to take over the Port Liberte project, its fate is in the hands of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the Federal agency charged with rescuing the nation’s failed thrift institutions.

From the NY Times:

Less Luster on the ‘Gold Coast’
By ANTOINETTE MARTIN
Published: October 29, 2010

IN Hudson County, the once-shining Camelot of New Jersey’s housing market, condominiums are still king. In every month so far this year, 5 to 10 times as many condos as single-family houses were sold.

But that is not to say the picture is shiny for the Gold Coast in general, or condos in particular.

In fact, as of Oct. 1, there was a 15-month inventory of unsold condominiums, just as there was for single-family houses, according to an analysis of sales statistics done by the Otteau Valuation Group of New Brunswick. Translation: If no more units were listed for sale, it would take 15 months to sell those already listed, at the current sales pace.

A six-month inventory is what real estate professionals consider healthy.

In Hoboken the inventory was just over nine months. In Jersey City it had swelled to 17.6 months. In specific Jersey City neighborhoods, the situation varied: a 13-month inventory downtown, where more than 400 condos are for sale; 42 months (three and a half years) for Journal Square, where 200 apartments are listed and sales are very sparse.

Elsewhere, in three communities where the massive Port Imperial development is ensconced along the riverfront — Weehawken, West New York and Guttenberg — inventory levels ranged from 19 months to 2 years.

Inventories grew despite widespread cuts in price for both new construction and resales, as any home shopper might glean from all the “reduced” notices on Web sites.
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One of the Jersey City market’s big problems is that new projects keep opening there all the time. There were hundreds of units under construction three years ago as the housing market crumpled. Developers found ways to finish the work, but found the appetite for condos had been sated. Total sales did increase this year, but inventory levels increased much more.

In Hoboken, where sales have been flat since midsummer, newer buildings are still offering buyers a free period on service contracts. Some, like the Hudson Teacomplex, have added to the array of services — for instance, custom renovations — offered when a unit turns over.

At older buildings, and those a few blocks farther from the waterfront, price reductions are still considerable. An 830-square-foot renovated corner unit on First Street with a large deck was listed at $449,000 in June, reduced in August, and reduced further in October, to $408,000.

A somewhat larger loft unit on Newark Street, also renovated, with one and a half baths and a private roof deck, sold for $320,000 in 2003 and was offered for $510,000 last spring. In October the price was cut to $455,000.

Posted in Economics, Housing Bubble, New Jersey Real Estate | 89 Comments

The rising foreclosure resistance movement

Posted on October 29, 2010 by grim

From CNBC:

U.S. lawyer forms foreclosure resistance movement

In a stately 19th century mansion in the middle of this former textile mill town, a local political scion has formed a mortgage foreclosure resistance movement.

O. Max Gardner III, 65, pioneered techniques in preventing big banks from foreclosing on loans and has taught his methods to 559 other lawyers in the last four years.

He teaches a sort of legal jiu jitsu: how to exploit opponents’ large size and disorganization for the benefit of consumers who do not want to give up their homes.

Once lawyers exit his training program, they stay on his expanding e-mail list, and are allowed access to an online document repository to share information. They work together to come up with new ways to slow down foreclosures and share strategies on other bankruptcy issues, communicating at a rate of 350 messages a day.

In the fragmented world of consumer bankruptcy law, where lawyers that represent consumers often work at small firms, Gardner, from his one-person law firm, is creating a sort of virtual law firm with hundreds of partners.

“My clients are desperate. They have insurmountable financial problems, and I’m able to give them a remedy and an answer and an assurance it’s going to be all right. That’s pretty rewarding stuff,” said Gardner, sitting at the desk in the tiny first floor office in his 9,000 square foot home.

To his admirers, Gardner is a sort of a folk hero.

“He’s Atticus Finch,” said April Charney, an attorney with Jacksonville Legal Aid in Florida, referring to the lawyer in the novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” who is seen as a model for lawyers protecting the disadvantaged.
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Counsel opposing Gardner often view him as an agitator who gums up the bankruptcy process, said Joseph Greer III, a corporate bankruptcy lawyer in North Carolina who often works with creditors.

Posted in Foreclosures, National Real Estate | 188 Comments