With one-fourth of the nation’s foreclosures, Florida is still struggling to pull out of a housing crash that plunged it into recession. It continues to have one of the country’s largest backlogs of foreclosure cases: 360,000. This is in large part because the process, which in Florida requires a judge’s approval, is so slow-moving. RealtyTrac estimates that it takes nearly two years for lenders to repossess a foreclosed house in Florida, which is one of the longest time frames in the country. With 14 percent of Florida home loans in foreclosure, abandoned houses are scattered across the state. More than one of every six houses is vacant, according to the Census Bureau, a blight that can depress property values and attract criminals. “We have a lot of property that needs to get back in the stream of commerce and borrowers who need to get on with their lives,” said Representative Kathleen C. Passidomo, a Naples Republican and the bill’s sponsor in the Florida House of Representatives. Ms. Passidomo said she had revised the bill several times to address the concerns of homeowners, who fear they would be left with fewer safeguards against unscrupulous lenders, and banks, which are still reeling from the robo-signing scandals. Housing advocates, who sent busloads of people to the capitol last week to protest the bill, said that Ms. Passidomo was listening to many of their concerns. “I think the bill has improved a lot,” said Alice Vickers, the consumer issues advocate for the Florida Consumer Action Network, adding that advocates still had concerns. The bill’s prospects for passage have improved in the last week. It cleared its final House committee on Thursday and now heads to the House floor. A similar measure is moving through committee in the Senate. The legislation attempts to speed foreclosures in several ways, including by requiring lenders to move more quickly. Lenders have been overwhelmed by the number of cases and do not always want to assume ownership of a home that is worth less than its mortgage, foreclosure experts say. The bill would allow any lien holder, not just the lender, to initiate the foreclosure process. This means that a condominium or homeowners’ association — which must often contend with unpaid fees by an owner who is behind on a mortgage — would have the legal right to jump-start the process in court by asking for a hearing to let them take action. This could push lenders into quicker turnarounds. The measure would also make it easier for lenders to foreclose on vacant homes once they completed a checklist to ensure that it had been abandoned. Often, these homes sit in the pipeline for extended periods. In addition, the bill would require that all paperwork and necessary documents be filed right away after a foreclosure proceeding began, and not piece by piece as the process moved ahead. Homeowners would find some relief in a provision that would shorten the amount of time, to one year from five years, in which lenders could seek a deficiency judgment, or the money they say they are owed on an underwater mortgage. If banks wanted to come after homeowners, they must do it in the first year, and not years later. Bankers dislike this provision. “In four of five years, these people could have acquired a new job or new assets,” Ms. Passidomo said, or worse, “tried not to get a good job and acquire assets because they know bank can come after it for five years.” Ms. Vickers said that she and other advocates still had concerns, including the need to give homeowners notice when a condominium association was moving to foreclose. “I think we would all like to see the backlog go away and we would all like to see property values start to increase,” Ms. Vickers said. “But it’s a balancing act to make sure that we don’t erode homeowner protections in our zeal to move the housing market along.”
