Tag Archives: foreclosures

Foreclosures and other dead ends

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In case you ever fantasized about making a million or few by house flipping —

There are two avowed official registries of foreclosures that take place in Prince George’s County, Maryland. One is included in the statewide registry maintained by the State of Maryland. The other is maintained by the Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement (DPIE, pronounced “D-Pie,” as in “cherry pie”).

Neither registry is open to the general public. The Maryland Foreclosed Property Registry is, as stated on its website,

an online, password-protected system managed by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Regulation in the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation (“DLLR”).

By law,

DLLR may grant access to the Registry only to State agencies and local jurisdictions, including counties and municipal corporations

to facilitate code enforcement, etc. The DLLR’s registry is not a before-the-fact research tool in any case; it is not a list of properties coming on the market.

Effective October 2012, in accordance with Maryland Code, Real Property Article § 14-126.1, every residential property purchased at a foreclosure sale must be registered in this system.

Purchasers are required to submit an initial registration of the property within 30 days after the foreclosure sale.

The purpose of the Maryland registry is to close the chronological records gap between the date of the foreclosure sale and the date the deed is recorded,

when unoccupied homes may fall into disrepair and it can be difficult to identify or contact the new owner.

The purchaser still has that 30-day grace period between buying a foreclosed property and submitting the registration. And again, the registry is not publicly accessible.

The information contained in the Registry is by law not a public record, and DLLR cannot grant access to the general public.

Prince George’s County

The registry maintained by the Prince George’s County Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement (DPIE) is also closely held, though apparently in a different sense. DPIE’s public notice, on the agency website, explicitly tells mortgage holders to register foreclosures:

Foreclosure Property Registration Form

Attention Lenders
Please register a property (residential or commercial) that is in the process of foreclosure. After the information is completed, it will be added to Prince George’s County’s Foreclosure Property Registry.

The form itself tells lenders to deliver it in person or mail it to the DPIE “Foreclosure Registration Unit” in an office condo at 1220 Caraway Court, Largo, Maryland. The form includes spaces for the name, address and contact information of the property owner; it does not include any statement or certification that the property owner has been contacted about the foreclosure.

P. G. County DPIE Foreclosed Property Registration Form

Questions have now arisen as to how the Prince George’s County foreclosure registry is used. Like the State of Maryland registry, it is not open to public view. According to a person with close knowledge of the process, “Historically,” the registry kept by DPIE has been “highly restricted.” The County foreclosure list is announced via DPIE website for the purpose of registration, but the list itself is “held very close to the vest.” Access to the registry is applied for through a Maryland Public Information Act request; form linked here. To find out about the foreclosures, you fill out the form and submit it, asking for records. The form then goes up the managerial pipeline through “appropriate channels.” Indications are that even people involved in the MPIA process are not necessarily involved in the resolution of MPIA requests, nor are they necessarily informed about requests granted or denied. The hole in the channels leaves open a realistic possibility that access to the registry may be secretive but may not always be protected. This possibility has been confirmed in interviews and conversations with County officials.

The stated rationale for holding the P. G. County foreclosure registry so closely is the danger of squatting in vacant properties. The County does not release the information on upcoming foreclosures because officials do not want to give advance notice to squatters. “You can read between the lines” as to this claim, this writer was told. I asked whether the list breaks down into foreclosures on abandoned properties and foreclosures on occupied homes. Answer: no.

Where to file if you’re foreclosing in P. G. County

Asking whether interested parties such as house flippers could access the registry, I was told, “You’re on the right track.” There is no in-house mechanism to prevent exchange of friendly influence or sharing information with flippers. Indeed, the Director of DPIE himself, Haitham Hijazi, is closely connected to more than one house-flipping company through immediate family members as well as through his ownership of property on which his relatives operate their businesses. (Previous blogs on this topic linked here and here, among others.) Dr. Hijazi has not returned messages requesting comment or information. His son Abdullah Hijazi, principal of a house-flipping company who has appeared as party and as attorney in numerous foreclosure cases, has also not replied to request for comment.

The foreclosure registry may be somewhat arcane to the general public. However, as someone with knowledge of the operating structure and the registry has said,  “your information is known by a variety of people here”–meaning in the county and in county government. But–“they also know nobody’s doing anything about it.” The problems with foreclosures, the genuine phenomenon of troubled homeowners being pushed out of their homes by people with a vested interest in the houses is “Probably pretty well known among key people in the county,” I was told, but county officials cognizant of the issues seem to be covered by “teflon.”

As previously noted, Hijazi as head of the Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement is one of County Executive Rushern Baker’s few holdovers from the previous county administration. Baker’s office has not yet had time to return a call requesting comment.

More to come

 

The other side of house flipping: pushing out the homeowners

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Ironically, the Director of the Prince George’s County Department of Permitting, Inspections and Enforcement (DPIE) acquired his own residential property in the aftermath of the 2008-2009 mortgage derivatives debacle.

The real property on Willes Vision Drive in Bowie, Maryland, owned by DPIE Director Haitham Hijazi, sold in October 2004 for $600,728. Real estate near Bowie and Upper Marlboro was looking up back then. Sadly, Maryland public records show that the couple who owned the house sold it to a family member of Hijazi’s in October 2009 for about half what they had paid–$332,000. The purchaser, Fawaz Hijazi, then sold the house to Haitham Hijazi in July 2012 for $480,000–an apparent profit of $148,000, which might not be enough to retire on but was not a bad sale for the still-difficult market of 2012. Hijazi also got a reasonably good buying price on a house now valued by Zillow at an estimated half-million dollars. Hijazi’s office has not yet returned a call with questions.

Members of Hijazi’s family live in the house. The residential address is also listed in Maryland’s state Department of Assessments and Taxation as the office address of Integrity Professional Contracting, one of the Hijazi family members’ real estate businesses.

Yet more ironically, following up on the previous post on this topic, one can further track the family’s house-flipping business generated from this address. As found in state database real estate transaction listings and Washington Post home sales, typical examples are listed below. The list looks like the previous one. All properties are located in Prince George’s County:

  1. In October 2012, Integrity Professional Contracting bought the house at 9805 Walnut Avenue in Lanham, Maryland, for $109,000 (foreclosure). In April 2013, the company sold the house for $240,000.
  2. In August 2012, Integrity Professional Contracting bought the residence at 8516 Potomac Avenue, in College Park, for $148,000 (foreclosure). The company sold the house in April 2013, for $280,000.
  3. In April 2013, the company bought 5701 44th Avenue, in Hyattsville, for $207,000. Sold that July for $340,000–an affordable price considering its current valuation.
  4. In August 2013, Integrity Professional Contracting bought another immigrant-owned house, at 2305 Belleview Avenue in Cheverly, for $136,000. The seller of record was William M. Savage, who has acted as a ‘substitute trustee’ in a number of foreclosures. The Hijazis’ company has also bought other properties from, or through, Savage. The company sold the Belleview house in April 2014 for $250,000.
  5. In October 2013, Integrity Professional Contracting purchased 4814 Snowflower Boulevard, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, from another immigrant householder for $105,500. The homeowner had bought the house in July 2006 for $376,295. The company currently owns this property, according to the state real property database; the owner mailing address is the Hijazis’ residence and company office in Bowie.
  6. In April 2013, the company bought the property at 4815 Heath, in Capitol Heights, for $41,000 (foreclosure). The company sold the house in December 2013 for $190,000.

Further examples follow the same pattern, visible to anyone who checks. Even without delving deep, the effect on neighborhood property values is obvious. A house that the lender could resell within a few months–apparently, since that’s what the flippers are doing–is instead sold to a house flipper at a loss for the lender and at a terrible loss, sometimes, for the unwilling homeowner. Since the house flipper is dignified by terms like “foreclosure attorney” and “substitute trustee,” all this is nominally at the behest of the bank/lender, even when to the lender’s loss. And the next buyer gets a cut-price house, often without knowing much about the previous foreclosure sale, including the fact that the nominal ‘seller’–the flipper–was actually one of the parties in the foreclosure.

The Hijazi family also owns another real estate entity, this one registered in the SDAT database by the name of Secured Improvements, LLC (a limited liability company). Like Integrity Professional Contracting, Secured Improvements LLC has a mailing address at the Bowie property owned by Haitham Hijazi. According to the LexisNexis business database, Secured Improvements LLC was established in April 2004, as was Integrity Professional Contracting. Its Maryland state filings date from 2011. Those for Integrity Professional Contracting date from 2004.

House sold by Secured Improvments LLC

As with Integrity Professional Contracting, the company designation for Secured Improvements in WaPo house sales is “Corp.” rather than the technically accurate LLC.

Again as with Integrity Professional Contracting, Secured Improvements LLC has established a track record as a house-flipping company. Again, its business pace picked up in the years after the elder Hijazi began working in supervisory positions for Prince George’s County. A quick check of WaPo home sales shows seven home sales for the company from 2006 through 2009. For 2011, eight deals. For 2012, nine. For 2013, thirteen. Then seven, six, and seven respectively for the years 2014-2016.

Like Integrity Professional Contracting, the Secured Improvements company has obtained some houses through ‘substitute trustees’ including Mark H. and Gerard W. M. Wittstadt.

Sad to say, there are more ways to game the system even than the intermingled interests sketched above.

More to come.

 

Michigan and Arizona primaries 2012

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February 28, 2012, primaries in Arizona and Michigan

Santorum in Michigan

GOP primaries in Michigan and Arizona today–and it will be mildly interesting to see which candidate Republican voters will be stuck with, if either. On the one hand they have the lurid imaginings of former Pennsylvania Rep. Rick Santorum, who is more and more coming to seem like the type of religio more hell-bent on damning other human beings than on sharpening his own conscience. Deafness to the promptings of conscience might or might not be expected of someone who spent his years out of office working as a corporate lobbyist in DC, even if the lurid version of religion dominating Santorum’s idiom is not stereotypically associated with the kind of inside-the-Beltway job Santorum held, and profited from.

 

Romney

On the other hand primary voters have former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who famously penned an op-ed for the New York Times Nov. 18, 2008, titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.” ‘Flip-flopper’ or not, Romney has stuck by his argument on this one, following up recently in Michigan with a Feb. 14 op-ed in a Detroit paper calling the auto rescue “crony capitalism.”

 

Automobiles and candidates

Santorum has been proclaiming a “two-man race” in the Republican primaries for several weeks. It seems like years. Most of the political press is following suit for the moment–while waiting to see whether Newt Gingrich’s race-baiting resuscitates the Gingrich campaign in the South in March. It is tempting to streamline the Romney-Santorum contest as a contest between the corporate-insider and barking-dog segments of the Republican Party, dignified as ‘wings.’ This would be over-simplification.

Not that Romney isn’t giving this over-simplification all the help he can. Set aside the off-the-cuff references to the two Cadillacs (American-made cars; that’s why Romney mentioned them in Michigan) his wife drives, or to the Nascar team owners Romney knows. More importantly, Romney also advocated letting the foreclosure crisis run its course, an argument obviously not targeted for Arizona. While Arizona’s foreclosure problems do not equate to those in neighboring Nevada, in December 2011 Arizona hit the top-ten list for foreclosures by state. Spikes in oil prices that deter travel to the wide-open spaces in the Southwest will not help over coming months.

Needless to say, Rick Santorum is even farther to ‘the right’ on the auto-industry and foreclosure issues. Santorum may speak touchingly of miners related to him personally, but when it comes to holding mine owners accountable for mine safety—or any other wholesome and necessary regulation to save lives and health—he’s on the other side, if quietly.

 

Speaking of oil prices–

There are a few facts that the GOP candidates—except occasionally for Ron Paul–do not mention on the campaign trail:

  • Gasoine prices spike when oil prices spike. When the price of crude jumps, the price at the pump is sure to follow. Historically, by the way, a decline in crude price is less swiftly followed, and less equivalently, by a decline in pump price.
  • Spikes in the price of crude oil come largely from rampant, unchecked speculation on oil futures; less from demand for the oil than from betting on the future price of oil
  • Speculation on oil futures in recent days—heightened buying ahead of retail, which has driven up the price of crude–has been fueled by the public discourse, if you call it that, over Iran
  • Iran, as we know, is now newly and again being touted as the favorite hot spot for right-wingers in politics and in Fox-ified media outlets, ever on the look-out for the next war to send other people to

Then these cats vilify President Obama for not doing something magical to hold down the price of oil or of gasoline. Even rightwing columnist George Will criticized that one. (It would be interesting to know why.)

Forget the sense of honor and of patriotism that used to keep even lunatic-fringers from attacking a president on foreign policy, on the campaign trail, while he was in the midst of delicate and tense negotiations. Can Romney, Gingrich and Santorum honestly be oblivious to the fact that their own super-fatted rhetoric—figuratively the equivalent of pouring grease on a kitchen fire—contributes to the tension of disagreements over Iran, and thus to spiking oil prices?

If so, they may be the only ones oblivious. Donor lookup is key. The oil and gas industry so far has contributed far less in 2012 than has the finance sector. Oil and gas are obviously holding back to see who their 2012 standard bearer will be, rather than picking one. But contributions from the energy industry are going—not surprisingly—overwhelmingly to Republican candidates (not including Ron Paul). Six to one, they’re donating to GOPers rather than to Dems. Now that Rick Perry is out of the race, they’re donating mostly to Romney. Predictions are silly, but it’s still hard to see Santorum as having a chance.

more later

[update 10:45 a.m.]

“It’s important not to be afraid to stand up for what you believe in.” –heard from a registered Democrat who voted for Santorum in the GOP primary. Also said he was not trying to make trouble; he voted for Obama in 2008 and is not sure, he said, whether he would vote for Obama again in 2012.

There is more than one quick, efficient, on-the-nose lesson here. For one, it nutshells what is  most damaging to Mitt Romney as a candidate: that he comes across as consistently afraid, depending on audience, to stand up for what he believes in. Second, that anyone with this perception would gravitate toward Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich–as though their loathesome fulminations were courage–testifies again to the poor political analysis and weak political reporting most of the public gets.

Third, something about this reminds me of David Plouffe’s epically stupid remark when Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Plouffe’s response? –to warn against blaming violence in any way on violent rhetoric. (In other words, propaganda doesn’t work? If it doesn’t work, why does the lobbying-candidate cabal use it?) This voter’s comment should be a reminder. The White House would be mistaken to fall into the same hole. The president cannot afford to come across as afraid to stand up for what he believes in.  To do him justice, I think Obama is in fact able to stand up for what he believes in. And he has brought about tremendous change, most of which he has not been given credit for.

But the Rahm Emanuel wing of the party–what they stand for is them, as the saying goes in Texas–has influenced too much of the discussion coming out of media outlets (especially since AOL bought the supposedly progressive Huffington Post).

For the record, I oppose voting in the other party’s primary. No one should be voting for the policies espoused by Romney or Santorum, which boil down quite simply to rich-get-richer and at the expense of the general good. That’s the message to send.

[update]

9:44 p.m. The networks/channels are still calling Michigan too close to call, even though it does not in fact look too close, let alone too close to call. Romney won Arizona, as expected, and looks set to pick up Michigan too–also as expected, though not in the most recent hours. Something like 43 percent Romney to 35+ percent Santorum, with Ron Paul and Gingrich finishing at 11 percent and single digits respectively.

Back to that note on oil prices: legal cases on oil-gas speculation are working their way through the judicial system. I wonder whether something might be accomplished by executive order of a president.

Speaking of legal cases, it is funny that Arianna Huffington and Huffington Post are still being characterized as having “credibility” after selling to AOL without repaying the millions of dollars’ worth of value contributed to HuffPost by unpaid bloggers. With whom does HuffPost still have credibility as a progressive outlet?