Orlando sheds some ‘zombie foreclosures’

More than 3,700 houses in Metro Orlando are considered “zombie foreclosures”: properties abandoned by owners before banks reclaim them, a new report shows.

The problem, said Winter Park real-estate agent Jerry Oller, is for sellers who live near an empty foreclosure.

“One of the bigger concerns is that owners have very little they can do about it, other than work with the homeowners association and come together with neighbors to try to maintain the yard,” said Oller, an agent with Fannie Hillman & Associates. “Unfortunately, I think that’s where they are a victim.”

For sellers who need to move along quickly, their only option might be to drop their price and get out before the condition of the neighboring house declines further, he added.

For homeowners who live near the lifeless structures, the good news is that those houses are selling to new owners who reclaim them. The number of those homes in the fourcounty Orlando area declined 33 percent by the end of January compared with a year earlier, according to a report released Thursday by real-estate-research company RealtyTrac.

The bad news, though, is that Orlando has one of the nation’s greatest shares of vacant foreclosures in late January. It ranks sixth among metro areas nationally. The Miami metro area ranks second, and a northern New Jersey metropolitan area ranks first.

Overall, Florida dominates the nation, with 35,903 owner-abandoned foreclosures in late January. Those numbers had declined 35 percent from a year ago. Nationally, zombie foreclosures were down 6 percent during that time.

“While the number of vacated zombie foreclosures is down from a year ago, they represent an increasing share of all foreclosures because they tend to be the problem cases still stuck in the pipeline,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.