The Wilmoth Group Blog

Over and over, one of the most common questions I receive is somebody wanting to know what bank owns a home in their neighborhood so they can call and complain about its upkeep.  The overgrown yard, broken windows, varmint and green swimming pools are just a little too much.  It is not unusual that upon researching the issue I find there is no institutional owner.  The legal owner is the caller’s old neighbor.  Yet, the banks continue to get hit over the head on this issue.

Here is the back story that needs to be told.  Preserving neighborhoods and communities needs to be all of our goals.  This has to start with a homeowner or occupant who has the resources to maintain the property to community standards.  Many of the efforts to keep an owner in a home, or allow a tenant to remain, seem to look past the issue of maintenance.  In all fairness, the same communities who are establishing all kinds of registrations and fines for vacant homes not being maintained, need to enforce the same standards on homes still occupied.   I have also actually seen communnities put the heat on a occupant and the occupant will then vacate the home..beginning the process of foreclosure.

I can make an argument that foreclosure is the right option when the homeowner refuses to maintain the property.  Foreclosure may hurt the values of surrounding properties, but not as much as the appearance of a vacant, run down home.  Here is where this issue often places blame in the wrong place,  In 15 years of working with banks on foreclosures, I have never worked with one that does not insist on their properties being maintained to the neighborhood standard.  Neighborhood standards is a wide brush I know but if you are in a community, those standards are the ones the banks follow.  If 50% of the homes on your street have boards over the windows, the bank will choose to secure their property in the same manner.

The challenge is care and maintanance of the property from the time the occupant stops taking care of it, to the time a bank legally obtains ownership.    Due to laws and courts that crawl with these cases, combined with all the efforts to make 100% certain a owner really does not want their home anymore, we now often have a year or more of no maintenance of these properties.  Any idea how bad the yard can look, or the pool can smell, after a year?  The Indianapolis Star has a community column where people can submit complaints of actual addresses with obvious maintenance or care issues.  The newspapaer follows up with the code authorities and at worst a citation is issued and the owner publicly disclosed.  I would estimate one out of 20 homes has a bank owner, and the bank violations are usually something that involves something not managed by the bank easily.  Such as debris being dumped at the back of the home weekly.  

My point..the banks care about condition for many reasons.  First, they want to uphold community values…they actually have a vested interest in this due to their ownership.  Second, the extraordinary measures being taken, combined with the length of the court process, have created many more issues than we use to see for homes in disrepair.  A community has little they can do other than cite an owner who no longer cares and then take care of the matter themselves.  In big cities like Indianapolis, there are not enough maintenance workers to stay on top of all the complaints.  The assumption that some big bank somewhere just does not care is false.  The bank may own this home in the future.  When they do, rest assured, maintenance and a better appearance will follow.