Bad news for Cherokee County homeowners
My wife remarked this morning that the Public Notices section of today’s Cherokee Tribune seemed unusually thick. I took a look at it and counted 213 foreclosure notices. That is more than twice as many as were listed one year ago.
Georgia is a “non-judicial state.” This means that holders of mortgages that have gone into default do not have to sue the property owners to take possession of the mortgaged properties, which can be sold at auction on the county courthouse steps on the first Tuesday by the lenders after four consecutive weekly notices in a designated local newspaper (which in Cherokee County is the Cherokee Tribune).
Some of these property owners will be able to avoid foreclosure by making some if not all of the back payments or selling their properties. Sadly most of them will be evicted from their properties as of the first Tuesday of February. That is a tragic turn of events for these home owners. It is also bad news for other property owners in their neighborhoods, because these homes usually wind up being sold for well below market price.
A research report, entitled There Goes the Neighborhood: The Effect of Single-Family Mortgage Foreclosures on Property Values, found that “each foreclosure of a conventional mortgage within an eighth of a mile (essentially a city block) of a single-family home results a decline in property value between 0.9 and 1.136 percent,” with even larger declines in low- to medium-income neighborhoods.
Send me an e-mail with your home address if you would like to know whether any pending or recent foreclosures are in your neighborhood.
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