Obama plan rewards 'good' behaving homeowners, Realtors say

NAPLES — Local real estate agents and brokers are still digesting President Barack Obama’s plan to help millions of Americans save their homes.

“It certainly doesn’t hurt,” said Mike Hughes, a vice president for Downing-Frye Realty Inc. in Naples. “But I really have to look at the specifics.”

He planned to do a lot of reading to try to sort it all out.

The $75 billion plan, unveiled Wednesday, promises to keep as many as 9 million people from losing their home to foreclosure. It’s unclear how many of those homeowners may be in Florida — or how many homeowners might benefit from the plan in Southwest Florida.

The plan includes billions in incentives for mortgage lenders to cut monthly mortgage payments, and it would offer help to borrowers who are “under water,” or owe more than their home is worth, and haven’t been able to refinance if their mortgages are owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

More government support will go to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac under the plan.

Brett Brown, president of the Naples Area Board of Realtors, said he likes the fact that the plan targets homeowners who have been doing the “right thing,” doing all they can to continue paying mortgages they can no longer afford.

“It’s a step in a positive direction,” he said. “It rewards good behavior.”

In the past, Congress appeared to be just rewarding bad behavior, helping those who had already missed payments, he said.

The plan, he said, also seems to send a message that borrowers who are in trouble, but who have not yet missed a payment, should call their lender for help.

While it’s hard to say how many people the mortgage relief plan might help in Florida, Brown suggests it might be as many as 1 million.

“It certainly should put a dent in the percentage of foreclosures,” he said. “It definitely should slow them down.” Cape Coral-Fort Myers had the highest foreclosure rate in the nation for 2008. According to Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac, 12.03 percent of housing units received a foreclosure related notice last year.

In Lee County, 41,040 properties received foreclosure filings in 2008, up 219 percent from 2007.

The foreclosure rate is based on the percentage of filings to households. It takes into account the number of default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

Naples-Marco Island landed at No. 10 in the country for its foreclosure rate last year.

In Collier County, 9,341 properties received foreclosure related filings in 2008, up 234 percent from 2007. The percentage of housing units getting a filing was 4.98, well above the national average.

Jeff Tumbarello, director of the Southwest Florida Real Estate Investors Association, closely tracks foreclosure trends in Lee County, writing a report every month. He welcomes Obama’s plan.

“I think it’s a great idea and what they should have been doing from the beginning,” he said. “The economy has caught up. We are in a negative feedback loop right now.”

“The sooner we fix the foreclosures, the sooner all this goes away,” Tumbarello said, referring to the bad economy.

While the plan has good intentions, he’s concerned about its execution.

“Some of the previous programs have been absolute failures,” he said. “Hopefully this one will be structured such that it will work.”

He said lenders would do well to cut loan amounts and reduce payments, rather than foreclosing on homes. On average, they’re losing 70 percent of the principal loaned on a sale when they foreclose in Lee County, he said.

Obama’s plan is not meant to help investors, but actual homeowners. About 37 percent of the homes that were foreclosed on last year in Lee County had homestead exemptions, which means they were primary residences, Tumbarello said.

On Wednesday night, he shared his latest information about foreclosure trends at a meeting of his association.

“Since we are not building anything, the foreclosures are the upcoming inventory,” Tumbarello said. “The foreclosures of today are the market of tomorrow.”

His research shows a total of 27,108 properties getting default notices, or lis pendens, in Lee County in 2008. Most of them _ 17,358 _ were for single-family homes.

Based on what he’s seen so far, he expects there to be 2,250 to 2,350 new filings this month. Last month, new filings decreased to 2,074, down from 2,201 in December. Filings dropped to 1,647 in November before spiking back up again in Lee County.

In Collier, new filings dropped by two in January to 661, down from 663 a month earlier. In November, there were 524 new filings.

Brett Ellis, with the Ellis Team at RE/MAX Realty Group in Fort Myers, presented at “State of the Market” report at the Southwest Florida Real Estate Investors Association meeting Wednesday.

“I’ve looked at the basic details of the Obama plan and I think that injecting capital into Fannie Mae is a good idea,” he said.

He also thinks helping people on the verge of foreclosure is good.

“However, I’m not in favor of a moratorium on foreclosures if they later propose that on non-homestead properties,” Ellis said.

In the past, 80 percent of homeowners who missed a payment and got a loan modification still ended up in foreclosure in such states as Florida and California, he said.

With property values continuing to decline and unemployment rising, more owners are just deciding to walk away from their mortgages. Ellis isn’t sure that will change.

“People are just walking,” he said. “So I’m not sure that President Obama’s plan is really going to help like people think it will. But any help is welcomed.”

He said the most critical concern is unemployment and he’s not sure if Obama’s economic stimulus plan, which the president signed earlier this week, will do enough to help.

“A lot of the spending is more than two years out,” Ellis said.

“We just spent about $250,000 per job in the stimulus package. I would just as soon give everyone $250,000 and see what that would do to the economy.”