By By LINDA RAWLS
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Nearly 5,000 St. Lucie County households defaulted on their mortgages in 2007, as resetting mortgages crashed head-on into plunging home prices and tightened loan policies.
Every single month of 2007 had more foreclosure filings than all 12 months of 2005, the figures for St. Lucie County show. Martin County homeowners didn’t fare much better. A total of 797 homeowners faced foreclosures last year, a 215 percent increase from 2006. Previously reported numbers for Palm Beach County pegged 2007 foreclosures at 13,962, a 189 percent hike from 2006’s 4,831. All foreclosure figures are from the county clerks’ offices.
“We have a lot of investors and average homeowners who took out mortgages they really couldn’t afford,” said analyst Mike Larson of Weiss Research in Jupiter. “Now that home prices are falling and housing inventory has piled up, those who get into financial trouble have less incentive to tough it out and keep paying their mortgages.” To understand just how fast and how high foreclosures have shot up in St. Lucie County – the fastest-growing city in America a few years ago, according to a front-page story in The New York Times – consider that there were only 203 foreclosures in all of 2005. During the heady real estate boom that peaked late that year, home builders flocked to land-rich St. Lucie and new homes sprung up seemingly overnight. As home prices soared during the boom, the only way many people could afford them was to take out so-called “exotic mortgages.” Subprime loans, no-doc or low-doc loans, teaser rates or adjustable-rate mortgages became available to nearly anyone who could fog a mirror, said some critics.
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http://www.palmbeachpost.com/business/content/business/epaper/2008/01/15/0116tcforeclose.html
