Wed, Nov 25 2009
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Published June 25, 2008 06:36 pm - Paul Bryant is fascinated by statistics, especially those dealing with the housing market in Ashtabula, Lake, Geauga and Cuyahoga counties. Foreclosed! County’s low-end housing suffers in subprime mess By CARL E. FEATHER - Lifestyle Editor - cfeather@starbeacon.com Star Beacon Paul Bryant is fascinated by statistics, especially those dealing with the housing market in Ashtabula, Lake, Geauga and Cuyahoga counties.
Bryant is a Realtor and past president of both the Lake County Association of Realtors and Ashtabula County Board of Realtors. Semiretired, he previously managed the Realty One office in Ashtabula Township. In the fall of 2007, Bryant pored over the listings in the Multiple Listing Service for Ashtabula, zeroing in on properties with a listing price of $80,000 or less. What Bryant discovered surprised this industry veteran. “Almost 39 percent were bank foreclosures,” says Bryant. “It was a huge percentage. ... (A) majority of the sales where of bank-owned properties.” When it comes to home foreclosures, Ashtabula County once again has the misfortune of being in Ohio. During the summer and fall of 2007, one in nine Ohio homeowners with a mortgage was at least 30 days behind on payments. The state had 3.7 percent of all home loans in foreclosure during the third quarter, according to a report released Dec. 6, 2007, by the Mortgage Bankers Association in Washington. During 2006, there were 718 foreclosure filings in Ashtabula County. In 2007, that number crept up to 740. That is one foreclosure for every 140 residents, or 16 foreclosures for every 1,000 housing units. Those are figures that put the county in the league of Louisiana, Michigan and Nevada, the nation’s top foreclosure states. It’s not getting better, either. In January, 70 foreclosure actions were filed. Sixty-two were filled last month. While much of the foreclosure issue is being blamed on the subprime-lending debacle, in Ohio there’s also the sour-economy factor at work. The January 2008 unemployment rate was 8 percent. Bryant says buyers, even investors, have been running scared. “The uncertainty of employment is the biggest problem,” Bryant says. “People just don’t know what’s going to happen to them in the next couple of years.” The result has been and continues to be a glut of homes on the market. As of mid-December, there were 1,015 single- and multi-family homes for sale in Ashtabula County. Last summer, the supply peaked at more than 1,100 homes. Based on closed sales of houses, the market time was 14.6 months. Bryant says with the current supply of homes and the average number of sales per month, it would take more than a year to clear the existing inventory. “It is a buyers’ market right now,” Bryant says. “We have a lot of people getting great deals.” The 30 percent of the population that rents can find significant housing bargains, especially given the glut of housing in the area: 12.7 percent of the units were vacant in 2006, up from 10 percent in 2000. Anecdotally, the number of classified ads for rentals far outnumber the help-wanted ads these days. Many landlords are offering incentives to get tenants into their properties. The rent bargins reflect the lower per capita personal income and lack of good-paying jobs in the county. Lyn Zalewski, executive director of Catholic Charities of Ashtabula County, says the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has set the fair-market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Ashtabula at $618 a month. To be able to afford that apartment, a head of household would have to earn $11.88 an hour, according to the formula used to establish capacity to pay rent. Steve Sargent, executive director of Samaritan House, the county’s only shelter for the homeless, says, based on his experience with placing homeless people, the average cost to rent a two- or three-bedroom apartment or house in the city is around $500. He feels that a wage of $16 to $17 an hour, plus benefits, is the minimum required to support a family with a couple of children. 
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