Prometheus 6

State laws give New Yorkers an advantage over homeowners elsewhere. According to PropertyShark’s chief executive, Ryan Slack, New York courts typically consider the buyer of the property to be the owner, while California treats the bank that holds that mortgage as the owner.

Banks in California can foreclose on a property and take it back in roughly seven months, but banks in New York have to go through a legal battle that can take more than two years.

That means that New Yorkers have more time to find ways to hold onto their homes.

Missed Mortgage Payments Rise 20% in Third Quarter
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

In the third quarter of this year, the number of city residents who had missed more than three months of mortgage payments jumped by 20 percent compared with the same quarter a year ago. Still, New Yorkers often have more time to try to hold onto their homes than homeowners in the rest of the country.

Data collected by PropertyShark .com, a real estate data company based in Brooklyn, shows that 1,468 city homeowners missed mortgage payments from July to September, compared with 1,220 in the comparable period last year. That puts them in what is commonly known as preforeclosure, when banks typically warn people that they are at risk of foreclosure so the homeowner will take steps to catch up on the payments. But while more homeowners are in the danger zone, more have also been able to avoid foreclosure. In New York City, lenders foreclosed on 425 homes in the third quarter of 2006, compared with 545 in the year-ago period. (The city has 3,018,000 homeowners.)

John McIlwain, a senior fellow for housing at the Urban Land Institute, a nonprofit planning and research group in Washington, said of the jump in preforeclosures, “It’s a warning sign, but it’s not yet a serious problem in terms of the market.”

The neighborhoods with the highest number of preforeclosures are in Brooklyn and Queens. The Canarsie and Flatbush neighborhoods of Brooklyn had the largest number last quarter, with 37. Elsewhere in Brooklyn, Bedford-Stuyvesant had 32 preforeclosures and East New York had 31. Jamaica, Queens, had 31 preforeclosures. The same neighborhoods had the most preforeclosures the year before.