The crush of foreclosures in the Southwest Florida real estate market has seriously started to subside as we head into 2012. It seems Lenders only filed 5,419 foreclosure lawsuits in Lee County in 2011, a decrease of 48.3% from the 10,447 in 2010 and 75.1% below the peak of 21,768 filings in 2009. For Collier County, Lenders filed 2,842 foreclosure lawsuits, a decrease of 36.2% from the 4,452 in 2010 and 72.5% below the peak of 8,421 filings in 2009. All in all, it’s not too bad when you consider we’ve had well over 100,000 foreclosures in the two county areas since January, 2006.
Continue Reading Southwest Florida Foreclosures: 2011 End of Year Review
Tags: buyers, Florida, foreclosures, markets, real estate, sellers
After our last post reviewing some of the 
What stories impacted Florida real estate the most in 2011? Our guess is it depends on your perspective; were you a buyer or a seller? Did you lose your job or find a new one, were you looking for a rental or did you need a place to locate your existing or new business? All these scenarios were impacted one way or another in 2011. So, let’s take a look back at just what occurred and see if any will continue into 2012.
Florida courts will no longer require mandatory foreclosure mediation after the Florida Supreme Court announced it will close down the two-year-old program yesterday. Citing reports the program didn’t work as well as hoped and that the court system could no longer justify the cost, Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles Canady said new foreclosure cases will no longer be referred to mediation.
The following is a brief review of the requirements of the Foreign Investment in Real Property Tax Act. Known as FIRPTA, the act requires that a buyer of real property in the United States must withhold 10% of the gross sales price and send it to the IRS if the seller is a “foreign person.” A foreign person is described as a non-resident alien or a foreign corporation that has not made an election to be treated as a domestic corporation. It does not include a resident alien that holds a “green card.”
