Is There Any Help if I’m Behind on My Mortgage in Jacksonville?
Yes. The City of Jacksonville runs a program that can put up to $12,000 toward your mortgage right now, and the city’s own page says it’s first come, first served.
It’s called the Foreclosure Intervention Program. It’s for homeowners behind on their mortgage and trying to stop a foreclosure, and it covers mortgage counseling, direct mortgage assistance, loan modification and refinance counseling, and budget help.
How Much Money Is Available, and What Can It Be Used For?
Up to $12,000. That money can bring your mortgage current, help complete a modification, or refinance an existing adjustable rate mortgage into a fixed one. The city’s page says applicants can apply now.
Do I Have to Pay It Back?
Yes, eventually, and this is the part both official pages agree on word for word. It’s not a grant. The money comes as a deferred payment loan secured to the property for five years.
That’s a lien. It sits behind your mortgage, and it stays attached to the house, not just to you.
Am I Eligible? Two Government Pages Give Two Different Answers
The City of Jacksonville’s own page sets the income limit at 80 percent of area median income and publishes a table it labels 2026. A one person household tops out at $60,600. A four person household tops out at $86,950.
Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, the organization the city names as its intake partner, publishes a different limit on its own page: 140 percent of area median income, on a table labeled 2020-2021. A one person household there tops out at $73,360. A four person household tops out at $104,720.
Those are two different eligibility screens for the same program, published in different years, not one number that moved over time. Nobody averages them, and a number that’s close to either one is closer to a phone call than to a self-screen off a web page.
The two pages don’t agree on where you have to live, either. The city’s page covers the City of Jacksonville, not including Baldwin, Jacksonville Beach, Neptune Beach and Atlantic Beach. Legal Aid’s page says Duval County, which includes those four towns. They’re describing different ground.
What Counts as a Hardship?
You have to document one, and the city’s page gives its own list: loss of employment, a death in the family, a disability, a medical issue that reduced your income, or a recent divorce or separation that reduced your income. You also have to own the home and live in it as your primary residence.
That’s one household at four different bad moments, not four different kinds of people. Whoever lost a job in March is the same person three payments behind by June.
Who Do I Call?
The city’s page names one provider: Jacksonville Area Legal Aid, 126 West Adams Street, (904) 356-8371 extension 401 for intake, apply@jaxlegalaid.org. Legal Aid’s own page names three: itself, at a different extension and with a different staff contact, plus St. Johns Housing Partnership in St. Augustine and the Jacksonville Urban League.
Given how much these two pages disagree already, the second and third numbers are worth having on hand too.
What Happens to the Loan if I Sell Before Five Years?
Neither official page says. That’s the real question to ask at intake, before you sign anything, and it’s a question for the provider and a real estate attorney, not a web page.
A deferred payment loan secured to the property is a lien, and it comes due on sale. If you take this money and end up selling inside the five years, that lien has to get paid off or dealt with at closing, alongside whatever you already owe on the mortgage itself. Somebody using this money to catch up has a real chance of needing to sell before the five years are out.
What About the Federal Program I’ve Heard Of?
If you’re thinking of Florida’s Homeowner Assistance Fund, the federal money that helped a lot of distressed homeowners over the last four years, that one’s closed. The National Council of State Housing Agencies lists it as closed for Florida, and as of this morning only Montana, New Jersey, North Dakota and the Virgin Islands still show an open program.
The city program is a different pot of money, run by a different agency, with its own rules. It’s open right now.
I’m licensed in Jacksonville, Florida, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk. Reach out if you want a second set of eyes on any of this before you call.
JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking beats typing.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
What Happens If I Can’t Pay My Condo Special Assessment?
You can’t get out from under it by handing back the keys. Florida law says a condo owner’s liability for assessments isn’t avoided by giving up use of the common elements or by abandoning the unit itself. The bill keeps running in your name for as long as you own it, and it doesn’t stop at the closing table either.
Does Selling the Unit Get Me Out of It?
Not entirely. When title changes hands, the old owner and the new owner are both jointly and severally liable for whatever went unpaid up to the transfer. A buyer’s closing can clear the balance. Walking away from the unit on your own doesn’t.
Why Does the Balance Keep Growing Even When I’m Paying?
I wrote about this same rule for HOA dues a few weeks back. Condos run on close to the same structure, just under a different statute, Chapter 718 instead of 720.3085.
Any payment the association receives goes first to interest, then to the administrative late fee, then to collection costs and attorney fees, and only after all of that to the assessment itself. Writing “for assessment only” on the check doesn’t change the order. The statute says that instruction gets ignored. Where the declaration doesn’t set an interest rate, the default is 18 percent a year, and the late fee can run up to the greater of $25 or 5 percent of each late installment. Somebody who starts paying again every month can watch the assessment itself barely move while the balance keeps climbing.
Can a Lien Just Sit on My Unit Forever?
No, and this is the part almost no owner knows exists. Once the association records a claim of lien, it’s only good for one year unless the association files suit to enforce it inside that year. An owner who wants to force the issue can record a Notice of Contest of Lien, a form printed right in the statute, which puts the association on a 90 day deadline to sue. Miss that window and the lien is void.
How Much Warning Do I Get Before a Foreclosure Judgment?
At least 45 days, in writing, in language the statute spells out, before a judge can enter judgment on the lien. There’s a real cost to the association if it skips that step. If it forecloses without giving proper notice and the assessments get paid before final judgment, the association recovers no attorney fees and no costs.
Can I Just Rent the Unit Out to Cover the Shortfall?
Maybe not. If the declaration or bylaws let the association approve or turn down a lease, being delinquent at the time approval is sought can be grounds for the association to say no. The move that looks like the obvious fix is one the arrears can block.
What Happens to Leftover Assessment Money?
An association has to spell out, in writing to every owner, what a special assessment is actually for, and it can only spend that money on the stated purpose. Once the purpose is finished, whatever is left becomes common surplus, and the board either sends it back to owners or credits it against future assessments.
What This Doesn’t Settle
None of this says what any particular owner should do with their own file. That turns on the declaration, on what the association has actually recorded, on what the mortgage is doing, and on whether anything has been filed yet. Once a case is filed, the dates come from a statute and a judge, and that’s a conversation for a real estate attorney. I’m not one.
I’m licensed in Jacksonville, Florida, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk. Reach out if a question like this ever lands on your own file.
JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking beats typing.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
I’m Behind on My Mortgage. Should I Stall Until the Market Gets Better?
Probably not, and the reason has nothing to do with your own rate. If you’re behind and holding out for the market to turn before you sell, what you’re actually betting on is cheaper money showing up for whoever buys the house from you. Friday made that bet worse.
If I’m Not Refinancing, Why Does the Mortgage Rate Matter to My Sale?
Because it decides how many buyers can qualify and how much they can carry, not what you’d personally pay. Nobody behind on a mortgage and selling under pressure is shopping for a rate. But that rate still sets the size of the buyer pool standing in front of your house, and that pool is what turns into an offer.
What Did the Fed Chairman Actually Say?
Most of it was good news for the economy generally. Fed Chairman Kevin Warsh gave his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday, on his 100th day in the job. Business investment is up around 9 percent over the past year, the fastest pace since 2021. Corporate profits are up more than 20 percent. Unemployment sits at 4.1 percent. Warsh said he’d be hard pressed to call financial conditions restrictive.
Then he named two sectors still under strain: housing and agriculture. That’s the Chairman of the Federal Reserve putting housing on the short list of things not doing well, on the record.
On inflation he was direct. The Fed’s preferred gauge sits at 3.7 percent over the past year against a 2 percent target, and the six-month reading is worse, at 4.1 percent. He put the blame for 65 months of elevated inflation on the Fed itself, and said it needs to see inflation heading to target “clearly and at sufficient speed.” Otherwise, in his words, “we have work to do.”
What he wouldn’t do is say what happens next. He spent part of the speech arguing that a Fed chairman shouldn’t commit to a rate path, and closed by saying he’s committed to a discipline, not a decision.
So Is a Better Market Actually Coming This Fall?
Nobody knows, including the market, which changed its mind while the speech was still happening. Realtor.com Economic Research tracked the odds traders were pricing through the speech: a 64 percent chance the Fed holds steady in September beforehand, down to 54 percent fifteen minutes in, and by the end, a 57 percent chance of a hike instead. Their own read is that higher rates for longer hit housing on both the demand side and the affordability side, and that there’s no real mortgage rate relief coming this fall.
How Much Has the Rate Buyers Can Get Actually Moved?
Not much. Freddie Mac’s weekly survey put the 30-year fixed at 6.66 percent as of August 27, up a hundredth of a point from the week before. A year ago it averaged 6.56 percent. That’s a tenth of a point of movement across twelve months that included an election and a new Fed Chairman.
If somebody tells you buyers will have meaningfully more purchasing power in six months, they’re guessing. The last year says the number moves less than most people expect, in either direction, and the man with the biggest hand on it just said he won’t commit to a path.
What’s Actually Getting Worse While I Wait?
The amount it takes to catch up.
If you’re behind, the person asking this question in August is usually the same person who’ll be a few months further behind by winter. One missed payment becomes two, then three, and the amount needed to bring the loan current grows every month, on top of whatever fees and advanced escrow the servicer adds for taxes and insurance. That number doesn’t wait on the Fed, and it doesn’t wait on the market either. It runs on its own calendar.
And it’s the number that decides whether a sale even closes, because it sits inside what you owe. A house that would’ve covered the payoff in June can fall short by December without the price moving at all, purely because the amount owed grew in the meantime.
That’s the actual trade being made by stalling. It’s a market that might improve at some unnamed point, against an amount owed that grows every thirty days, guaranteed. Those two things aren’t on the same timetable, and only one of them is knowable.
What Should I Ask My Servicer Before I Decide Anything?
Two numbers, in writing: the reinstatement amount today, and the full payoff. They’re different figures, and a lot of people get quoted the wrong one. Then ask what each one looks like in ninety days. Put that next to what the house would sell for now. That’s the real shape of the decision, and it doesn’t need anybody’s rate forecast in it.
None of this settles whether selling is the right move for your situation. That depends on your income, what you owe, what the house is worth, and whether anything’s been filed against you yet. If a case has been filed, the dates in it come from a court and a statute, and that’s a question for a lawyer. I’m not one.
What Are My Options if the Numbers Don’t Work?
A few, and they cost different things. Catch up and stay, if the money gets there. Ask the servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way if the house covers the loan. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale if it doesn’t. Hand it back through a deed in lieu. Or let the process run and deal with what’s on the other side.
Which one fits is yours to decide, not mine.
I’m in Jacksonville, and distressed property is most of what I work on. My license stops at the state line, so a question like this from anywhere else goes out through the SFR® referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If any of this is close to your situation, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
I’m a Veteran and I’m Behind on My Mortgage. What Can My Servicer Offer Me Now?
There’s a way to get a delinquent VA loan current again without raising the payment. It’s called a partial claim, it went live this year, and most veterans it applies to have never heard the phrase.
What Is a VA Partial Claim?
A servicer identifies a veteran in default who might qualify, then puts them on a three month trial payment plan to check whether the current payment is affordable. Finish the trial, and the servicer pays off everything that’s overdue. The loan goes current.
The overdue amount doesn’t disappear when that happens. It moves.
If the VA Catches Up My Loan, Do I Still Owe That Money?
Yes, eventually. The VA reimburses the servicer for the amount that got paid off, and that reimbursement sits behind the mortgage until the servicer gets repaid. The servicer collects when the loan is paid off, refinanced, or the house is sold.
A partial claim buys a veteran current status today. It also adds a second number to the payoff, one that lands on whoever handles the closing later: the veteran refinancing, an heir, or an agent pricing a short sale.
Why Did the Old Program Go Away?
The partial claim exists because the program before it got pulled. VA Circular 26-25-2 says the VA implemented VASP, the Veterans Affairs Servicing Purchase program, on May 31, 2024, then rescinded it on May 1, 2025, with active trial payment plans allowed to finish through August 31, 2025. NPR reported in April that VASP had given more than 33,000 veterans new mortgages at 2.5 percent before the VA shut it down with about a week of notice.
The same NPR report, citing ICE Mortgage Technology data, counted more than 10,000 veterans who lost their homes to foreclosure in the year after VASP closed, the fastest pace for VA loans in a decade, with another 90,000 behind on payments or already in the foreclosure process. Those are April figures. Nobody has published a Florida breakdown of them.
What Else Can My Servicer Offer Besides a Partial Claim?
The VA lists several options alongside the partial claim: repayment plans, standard loan modifications, 30 year and 40 year modifications, and disaster modifications for veterans hit by a declared disaster. The VA says it worked with servicers on home retention for 173,000 veterans in fiscal year 2025. A veteran who isn’t getting anywhere with a servicer can call the VA directly at 877-827-3702, option 6.
Why Does This Matter in Jacksonville?
Naval Air Station Jacksonville and Naval Station Mayport sit in Duval County, and Naval Submarine Base Kings Bay is just over the Georgia line. VA loan files are ordinary work in this market in a way they aren’t in most of the country. An agent taking a listing from someone behind on payments has a real chance of sitting across from a veteran who has an option nobody’s mentioned yet, and a subordinate balance nobody’s priced into the net sheet.
Florida forecloses mortgages in court, in front of a judge. The VA also has its own process for closing out a loan where it holds a partial claim interest, laid out in a circular dated three weeks ago. How that federal process lines up against a Florida judicial foreclosure isn’t written down anywhere yet.
A partial claim is real relief, and it comes with a bill that arrives later. Both are true about the same loan.
I’m in Jacksonville, and distressed property is most of what I work on. If you’re a veteran trying to get a straight answer out of your servicer, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Can I Catch Up on My Mortgage After I’ve Missed Payments?
Yes. In July, 464,000 mortgages that were behind on payments went back to current, the most in a single month since March. Catching up isn’t rare. More loans caught up in July than fell newly delinquent.
How Many People Actually Get Current Again?
ICE published its July mortgage performance data Monday. A cure is a loan that was past due and isn’t anymore, whether that happened because somebody made up the payments, got a modification, or worked out a repayment plan with the servicer. 464,000 loans did that across every stage of delinquency, up 12 percent from June.
Inside that number, 64,100 loans cured out of serious delinquency, meaning 90 days or more past due. That’s up 7 percent and the strongest month for that group since October 2025.
Is It Too Late If I’m Already 90 Days Behind?
Not based on what servicers did in July. New defaults moved the other way: 102,000 borrowers crossed the 90-day line last month, down 4 percent from a year ago. FHA loans led that decline, 13 percent fewer new defaults than last year. ICE’s Andy Walden said new default activity has eased from last year’s pace in four of the past five months.
Being deep behind and being out of options aren’t the same thing. Cures at 90-plus days are running at their best rate in nine months, which means servicers are approving workouts, not just collecting.
What’s Happening to the People Who Don’t Catch Up?
The same release has the other half. Foreclosure starts hit 38,600 in July, up 23 percent from a year ago. Active foreclosure inventory reached 296,000 properties, up 43 percent annually. Completed foreclosure sales came in at 7,900, up 14 percent, though ICE notes that’s still only 59 percent of pre-pandemic volume.
The 464,000 who cured and the households behind those foreclosure starts aren’t two different populations. They’re the same kind of household at different points on the same slide. Nothing in the data says which way any one house goes.
Does Florida Show Up in This Report?
No. ICE names its five worst states for non-current loans this month: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Indiana and Arkansas. Florida isn’t on that list or the good one, and no Florida figure appears anywhere in this release.
That’s consistent with what I wrote here on August 27. Florida’s problem isn’t the rate people fall behind, it’s the rate cases move once they’re filed, because every foreclosure here has to go through a judge. That court process is the window a cure, a modification, or a short sale has to work inside. The cure numbers above are the argument for calling the servicer early rather than waiting for a letter that sounds official. What they can’t tell you is how long your specific file has, because that depends on your loan type, your servicer, and here in Florida, the court’s own docket.
In other news, a second report out this month explains something a lot of Florida homeowners are staring at on a renewal notice right now.
Why Did My Home Insurance Go Up Again When the News Says Rates Are Coming Down?
Because the number in the news isn’t the number on your bill. Matic’s mid-year insurance report, released August 6, put the national increase for newly written home insurance policies at 5.9 percent in the first half of 2026, down from 8.1 percent last year and 18.7 percent the year before. That’s a real slowdown, and it’s the number that made headlines.
What’s the Difference Between That Number and My Renewal Bill?
Homeowners actually renewing a policy saw an average increase of 10.6 percent over the same period. Down from 19.4 percent in 2025 and 28 percent in 2024, so the direction matches, but the level is nearly double the 5.9 percent figure everyone quoted. A new-policy rate is what a shopper gets quoted moving to a different carrier. A renewal rate is what you pay to stay put. Comparing your renewal to the headline number is comparing yourself to somebody who switched.
If your escrow account is what’s actually moving your payment, I walked through how that works on August 17: the servicer pays the bigger premium, your account runs short, and the shortage gets spread across the payments in front of you along with the higher amount going forward.
Is There Any Real Good News in This Report?
One count stands out more than the averages. 11.7 percent of renewing homeowners saw their premium go down this year, the highest share Matic has recorded, up from 7.4 percent in 2025 and 4.9 percent in 2024. The average number of quotes available per person also rose, 27 percent from last year and 74 percent from the 2024 low. Carriers are competing for business again in a way they weren’t two years ago.
Does Florida Follow the National Trend?
Matic names Florida as an exception, grouped with California and New Jersey as states still running double-digit premium increases. The report doesn’t publish a Florida percentage, so there isn’t one to quote here. What’s clear from Matic’s own wording is that the national moderation in the headline doesn’t describe a Florida renewal.
The useful move in this report isn’t the average, it’s the quote count. Seventy-four percent more quotes available than at the 2024 low means the market is worth re-shopping, and 11.7 percent of renewals came back lower this year. Nobody can tell you from a national report whether your specific roof, county and carrier put you in that group. That’s a conversation with an insurance agent, not a statistic.
Missed mortgage payments and a bigger insurance bill land on a house through different doors, but they both end up asking the same question: what do you do if the numbers stop working. Catch up if the money gets there. Ask the servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way if the equity is there. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale if it isn’t. Hand it back through a deed in lieu. Or let the court process run and deal with what’s on the other side. Each one costs something different, and which one fits is yours to decide, not mine.
I’m in Jacksonville, and distressed property is most of what I work on. My license stops at the state line, so a question like this from anywhere else goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If any of this is close to your situation, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
How Long Do I Have After the Bank Files Foreclosure in Florida?
Florida law sets a floor on how fast a foreclosure case can move, not a ceiling. Under Fla. Stat. 702.10, the earliest a judge can even hold a hearing on final judgment is 20 days after you’re served with a show cause order, or 45 days after you’re served with the complaint, whichever is later. That’s the minimum the statute allows. What happens after it is up to you, and it isn’t the same clock for everyone.
Why Do Florida Cases Take Longer Than Other States?
ATTOM’s foreclosure report for July came out this morning, and Florida shows up near the top of it twice. Second in the country for foreclosure starts, 3,277 of them. Third worst state foreclosure rate, one filing for every 2,232 housing units. But Florida isn’t anywhere in the top five for completed foreclosures, the ones where the lender actually takes the house back. Texas, California, North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia hold those spots instead.
ATTOM doesn’t explain that gap. Chapter 702 does. Fla. Stat. 702.01 requires that “all mortgages shall be foreclosed in equity,” which means a lender here can’t sell your house through a trustee and a notice on the courthouse door the way some states allow. It has to sue you by name in circuit court and get a judgment from a judge, no jury, before a sale date exists at all. Florida’s front end fills up fast because filing a lawsuit is easy. The back end moves at the speed of a docket because that’s what a lawsuit is.
What Actually Controls the Clock After I’m Served?
Section 702.10 runs two different directions depending on what you do with the papers.
File an answer that raises a genuine defense, and that’s cause for the court not to enter final judgment at the show cause hearing. Your case keeps moving through the normal court process instead of ending there.
File nothing and don’t show up, and the statute treats that as giving up your right to be heard. The court can default you and order the clerk to schedule a sale.
Same hearing, same statute, two different outcomes depending on which one you did.
There’s one more deadline that runs the other way. Under 702.065, if the lender agrees up front to give up any right to chase you for money afterward, the court has to enter final judgment within 90 days of the close of pleadings. That’s the fastest track the law allows, and it only opens if the lender gives up that right first.
Do I Have to Move Out Once the Case Is Filed?
No, not just because a lawsuit was filed. A lender can ask the court to order you to keep making payments during the case or move out, but 702.10(2)(i) exempts an owner-occupied residence from that request. If your homestead exemption is on the latest certified tax roll, the law presumes you’re living there and the exemption applies.
Is the Judgment the End of It?
No. Fla. Stat. 702.07 lets a circuit court rescind, vacate or set aside a foreclosure judgment at any time before the sale has actually happened, and dismiss the case once you pay the court costs. 702.08 then puts the mortgage back exactly where it stood before the case was ever filed, as if none of it happened. The sale is the line that matters. The judgment on its own isn’t.
Where Does a Short Sale Fit Into This Window?
A short sale is one of the things that can happen inside this window, and it runs on its own timeline. It needs the lender to agree to accept less than what’s owed, and that approval takes as long as it takes, separate from anything the court calendar is doing.
Florida’s deficiency statute names short sales directly. Fla. Stat. 702.06 gives the court discretion over whether to award the lender a deficiency at all, and for an owner-occupied home, caps it at the difference between what’s owed and the fair market value on the date of sale, short sale or otherwise. Whether a lender goes after that gap, and what any of it does to your credit or your taxes, are questions for an attorney and a CPA. I’m neither one.
Nobody in that 3,277 count went from current to a lawsuit in a single step. The person served this month is usually the same person who missed one payment in the spring, then two, then stopped opening the mail. Every stage above is a stop along that same slide, not a separate group of people.
What happens inside the window is yours to shape. Answer the suit and you’re on a different clock than if you don’t. Sell it short if the lender will take less. Sell it the ordinary way if the numbers reach. Let it run and deal with what’s on the other side. Each one costs something different, and which one fits your file is your call, not mine.
I’m in Jacksonville, and this is most of what I work on. A Florida license doesn’t reach past the state line, so a question like this from somewhere else goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If a question would be useful to answer, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking it through is easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Can I Sell My House if I Owe More Than It’s Worth?
Yes, but selling the house and covering what you owe on it are two different questions, and this year the market isn’t closing that gap the way it usually does. Home values nationally moved up 1.5 percent over the year to June, and lost ground against inflation for the thirteenth month running. In Tampa, they moved backward outright.
What Happened to Home Values in June?
S&P Dow Jones Indices released its June Case-Shiller numbers Tuesday morning. The national index rose 1.5 percent over the twelve months to June, up from 1.2 percent in May. Inflation over the same period ran 3.5 percent, and S&P’s own release calls this the thirteenth consecutive month home values have fallen in real terms.
Seven of the nineteen metros reporting a June figure were down over the year. Tampa was one of them, off 1.19 percent. Miami went the other direction, up 2.27 percent. Chicago led everything at plus 6.90 percent, and Seattle was the weakest market in the index at minus 1.95 percent.
Why Doesn’t “Prices Are Up” Help Me?
A short sale exists for one reason: the house won’t bring enough to pay off the loan. Whether somebody needs one comes down to the distance between what they owe and what the house sells for, and the usual advice to a homeowner behind on payments is to wait, because the market is supposed to close that distance on its own.
Over the year to June, the market moved the typical American house up 1.5 percent in dollars and down against the cost of everything else. Waiting is not doing the work people expect it to do. In Tampa, the market moved the typical house down in dollars too, not just against inflation.
What’s Happening in Tampa?
Tampa also has more short sale listings than anywhere else in the country. Realtor.com Economic Research counted 508 of them in May, ahead of Miami at 467, Orlando at 356, and Lakeland at 308.
Those are two different rulers pointed at the same place. Case-Shiller tracks the price path of the same houses selling again and again over time. The Realtor.com figure is a count of listings on the market right now. Neither one predicts what happens with any specific house, and both are reading Tampa the same direction this year.
Jacksonville isn’t in the Case-Shiller index, and neither is the rest of Northeast Florida. If you’re behind on a house in Duval, Clay, St. Johns or Nassau County, this data doesn’t reach you directly. The local numbers come from realMLS, not from a national index built around nineteen large metros.
So Can I Actually Sell?
You can always list the house. The question underneath the question is whether the sale pays off the loan, and that comes down to your actual payoff figure against what the house brings today, not what it was worth when you bought it or what a neighbor’s house sold for two months ago.
Start with the payoff, which your lender can give you and which almost always runs higher than the balance printed on your statement. Then build a realistic net sheet using what houses like yours are asking right now rather than what they closed at a couple of months ago, since closed sales describe an older market and asking prices describe this week’s. Only after that do you know whether your lender needs to be part of the conversation at all.
If the gap is real, the choices are the ones I laid out in full on August 19: catch up if the money’s there, sell the ordinary way if there’s equity, ask the lender to take less than the balance through a short sale if there isn’t, hand the property back through a deed in lieu, or let it run through the court. Each one lands differently on your credit, your taxes and what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so that last part is real here.
In other news, the Census Bureau released new home sales numbers Tuesday, and the inventory line in it is worth an agent’s attention.
What Did New Home Sales Actually Show in July?
New single family homes sold at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 607,000 in July, 10.5 percent below June and 6.3 percent below last July. In the South, the rate was 383,000, down 13.0 percent for the month.
None of those changes clear Census’s own 90 percent confidence interval, which means the month to month swing could be noise. One number in the release does clear its own error bar: houses for sale at the end of July, up 1.9 percent from June to 488,000, which works out to 9.6 months of supply against 8.5 in June.
What Is a Short Sale Listing Competing Against Right Now?
Completed, unsold new houses stood at 117,000 at the end of July, and on the unadjusted count, a finished spec house is sitting a median of 3.2 months before it sells, against 2.6 months a year ago. The South is holding most of that inventory, 301,000 of the 495,000 new houses for sale nationally on the unadjusted count.
A finished house with nobody in it is a seller with a carrying cost and a deadline, and a short sale listing is competing against that seller for the same buyer. It needs lender approval on top of everything an ordinary closing needs, while the builder down the street can close in three weeks and move on price or terms an underwater seller can’t touch. Pricing and setting expectations on a distressed listing have to account for that competition, not just the resale comps.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk. My license stops at the state line, so a question like this from anywhere else goes out through the SFR® referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If any of this is close to your situation, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
I Asked My Lender for Help and They Said No. Can I Ask Again?
Yes, but only if something about your situation actually changed since the first time you asked. HUD just wrote that into the rule FHA loan servicers have to follow, and every one of them has to be running it by September 21, 2026. That’s 27 days from today.
The rule is HUD Mortgagee Letter 2026-08, “Updates to Loss Mitigation Requirements,” dated June 23, 2026. Servicers can already use it. They have no choice starting the 21st.
What Counts as a Change That Lets Me Ask Again?
The section that covers this is titled When to Initiate Foreclosure. Once you’re three full payments behind, your servicer can start foreclosure after it finishes reviewing your first complete request for help, and any later complete request that follows a real change in your circumstances. It also has to tell you the decision and turn down any appeal you’re entitled to first.
The two words doing the work are “first” and “change.” Sending in the same paperwork a second time, with nothing different behind it, doesn’t hold the file anymore. It still gets looked at, but foreclosure is free to move on the same clock.
What Happens If I Get Offered a Payment Plan and Don’t Start It?
A trial payment plan is the run-up to a permanent fix. Three months is standard. Four if you’re at risk of falling further behind. Six if you took over the loan through certain transfers. Make the payments and a permanent modification gets put in place behind it.
The new rule adds a way to fail one for good. Turn down a trial plan a third time during the same stretch of missed payments, and your servicer has to report that as a failed plan, even if it turns around and offers you another one.
Turning it down isn’t about paperwork. HUD says twice that you don’t have to sign and mail back the trial agreement. Sending in the first payment, at the amount they ask for, is what counts as accepting. So a third strike means three plans offered and three first payments that never showed up, not three forms left unsigned.
HUD’s own reasoning is that some borrowers accept a trial plan on paper and then never actually make a payment, over and over, to keep the file from moving. The rule doesn’t ask why the third payment didn’t come. Somebody working the system and somebody who lost the job that was supposed to pay for it land in the same place.
What Still Works in My Favor Here?
A few things HUD kept, or added, on the borrower’s side of this same rule.
Your servicer has to get you the trial agreement at least 15 days before your first trial payment is due. Late fees get waived during the trial period as long as you’re paying what was agreed. You’re now allowed to send a trial payment early, ahead of the month it’s due. If a trial plan fails, your servicer gets an automatic 90 days to either offer something else or move toward foreclosure, which is 90 days the file isn’t at the courthouse. And if your taxes or insurance go up during the trial, your payment can move to match it instead of the whole plan falling apart.
What Happens If the Trial Plan Fails for Good?
If a trial plan fails and there’s no other permanent option you qualify for, the servicer has to look at what HUD calls Home Disposition Options. HUD’s own glossary defines that as exactly two things: a pre-foreclosure sale, which is FHA’s name for a short sale, and a deed in lieu.
That’s the order this is written to run in. The options to keep the house get tried first, and when those run out, a short sale or a deed in lieu comes before a lawsuit. Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, so that lawsuit step is real here, and it usually takes longer than the paperwork makes it sound.
Does Any of This Apply to My Loan?
Only if FHA insures it. This rule covers FHA-insured single family mortgages and nothing else. A conventional loan, a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loan, a VA loan, or a USDA loan runs under different rules entirely.
Most people can’t say offhand who insures their mortgage. The honest way to use any of this is to start with the symptom, not the loan type: are you being told no on a second try, or getting close to a third missed trial payment. Then find out who’s actually behind your loan before you assume this rule is the one governing your file.
None of this is a promise about what happens on your file specifically. Your eligibility and your servicer’s own review decide that, not this article.
Jacksonville, Florida is home base, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if this reached someone outside Florida, questions still go out through the SFR® referral network to somebody licensed where they are.
If a question like this fits your situation, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if a call’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Even if you accept this offer and use our service, your lender may not agree to change your loan.
How Long Do I Have to Fight My Property Tax Bill in Florida?
Twenty five days from the date your county mailed the assessment notice, not the day it landed in your mailbox. If the fight is over a denied exemption instead of the value itself, you get 30. The date that actually governs is the one printed on your own notice, because every county mails on its own schedule. In Duval County, the 2026 deadline lands on Tuesday, September 8.
That comes straight out of Florida Statute 194.011, read this morning in full at flsenate.gov.
What’s the Difference Between the 25 Day Clock and the 30 Day Clock?
It depends what you’re actually disputing.
A fight about the assessed value gets 25 days. That’s the number everybody quotes, and it’s the one most homeowners assume covers everything.
A fight about a denied exemption gets 30. So does a denied agricultural classification, a denied high water recharge classification, a denied historic property classification, and a denied deferral. Same statute, different starting notice, different clock.
A homeowner whose homestead exemption got refused is on the 30 day clock and usually doesn’t know it. A homeowner who thinks the house is assessed too high is on the 25 day clock and often assumes there’s a full month. Both mistakes come from reading the same paragraph too fast.
Does Calling the Property Appraiser Stop the Clock?
No, and this is where people lose their window without realizing it.
Florida law gives you the right to an informal conference with the property appraiser’s office, and the statute says the appraiser or a staff member “shall confer.” That’s real and it’s free.
The same section then says nothing about that conference is a prerequisite to filing an actual petition. It’s a parallel track, not step one. It doesn’t extend the deadline and it doesn’t replace the petition. Spend three weeks on friendly calls with the appraiser’s office and you can walk out of that process with the filing window already closed.
What if I Can’t Afford the Filing Fee?
There’s a waiver for exactly that, and almost nobody uses it.
Duval County’s Value Adjustment Board publishes three situations where the filing fee is waived entirely:
An appeal from the denial of a timely filed homestead exemption
An appeal from the denial of a tax deferral
A taxpayer who can show, at the time of filing, that they’re currently receiving temporary assistance under Florida’s Chapter 414, with documentation from the Department of Children and Families attached to the petition
That third one is the reason this belongs in a report about distressed property. The household most likely to be sitting on a higher assessment, a higher insurance bill and a payment they’re already behind on is the household least likely to hand over a filing fee to argue about it. The waiver exists and the board publishes it on its own site. Duval also runs a reduced $15 fee on several late filed applications, including certain late exemption filings and the disabled veteran and surviving spouse discount carryover.
Fee amounts are set county by county within the statutory framework, so what applies where you live may not match Duval’s numbers. Your own notice or your county’s Value Adjustment Board page will have the figure that actually applies to you.
Can My HOA or Condo Association File on My Behalf?
Yes, if the units are similar enough, and it’s written directly into the statute.
A condominium association, a cooperative association or a homeowners’ association can file one joint petition on behalf of members whose parcels the property appraiser finds substantially similar in location, proximity to amenities, room count, living area and condition. The association has to notify owners of its intent, by hand delivery or certified mail unless an owner agreed to electronic notice, and has to give at least 14 days to opt out in writing. A condo or co-op also has to post the notice on the property the same way board meeting notices go up.
An association already collecting a special assessment has a tool here that can cost its members a fraction of what filing individually would. Most boards have never touched it.
What Actually Decides the Hearing?
Two mechanics most people never hear about until they’re already in the process.
Evidence goes both ways, and it goes 15 days before the hearing. You have to give the property appraiser your evidence list, copies of everything you’ll ask the board to consider, and a summary of what any witness will say, at least 15 days out. The property appraiser has to do the same thing back to you, and their list has to include the property record card. If the appraiser misses that deadline, the statute says the hearing has to be rescheduled. That’s not discretionary, and most homeowners never find out it applies to them.
The petition itself is sworn, and it gets filed with the clerk of the Value Adjustment Board, not with the property appraiser’s office. How the filing has to arrive is a county by county rule. Some won’t accept a postmark and close online filing at a fixed time on the deadline date.
What Does Winning Actually Get Me?
A lower tax line, not a check.
An assessed value isn’t a market value, and a successful petition doesn’t put money in your pocket this year. What it changes is the tax portion of what you owe, and for someone stretched between a mortgage payment, an insurance premium and everything else, the tax line is still part of the number that has to add up every month.
If you’re carrying a shortfall and you also believe your assessment is wrong, the petition process is a free or nearly free administrative remedy with a real deadline on it, and that deadline is printed on a piece of paper already sitting on your counter. Ask a real estate attorney or a tax representative to walk you through your specific numbers. That part isn’t something I’m licensed to do.
I’m not an attorney and not a tax professional. Jacksonville, Florida is where I’m licensed, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk.
JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
What Is an Estoppel Letter, and Why Is It Holding Up My Closing?
If “estoppel letter” or “estoppel certificate” just came up for the first time and a closing is stuck because of it, here’s the short version. It’s the bill from the homeowners association or condo association, stating exactly what’s owed on the property, and Florida law gives the association ten business days to produce it. Nothing closes until it’s in hand.
Why Can’t Anybody Else Just Send This?
Because nobody else has the number. The closing agent can’t pay the association off without it, the seller doesn’t set it, and the title company can’t manufacture it. Only the association can say what it’s actually owed, on that property, as of that day. That’s the whole reason the document exists, and it’s why a closing sits still until it shows up.
How Long Does the Association Actually Have?
Ten business days, once a written or electronic request reaches them. Two full weekends. And the clock only starts once the request lands somewhere real: the statute requires every association to designate a person or entity, with a street address or an email address, on its own website to receive these requests. A request sent to the wrong inbox doesn’t start anything.
A lot of the pages that come up when you search this say the association has up to fifteen business days. I read both statutes in full this morning at flsenate.gov. Florida Statute 720.30851 covers homeowners associations, 718.116(8) covers condos, and both say ten.
What Does the Certificate Actually Say?
More than a dollar figure. It has to say what’s owed as of the day it’s issued and what’s scheduled to come due after that, and it also has to say whether there’s an open violation noted against the property, whether the board has to approve the sale and whether it has, whether anybody holds a right of first refusal and whether they’ve used it, and every other association the property belongs to. Any one of those can hold up a closing as long as the balance can, sometimes longer.
What If It Expires Before We Close?
It has a shelf life. Thirty days if it was emailed or hand delivered, thirty five if it came by regular mail. Most closings finish inside that window without a second thought. A file that’s stayed open longer than expected is the one where the date matters, because once the certificate goes stale, the balance on it isn’t current anymore and a fresh one has to be requested. An amended certificate is free and starts a new thirty or thirty five days on its own. The date is the thing to track, not the number.
What If the Association Just Won’t Send It?
Florida’s statute has a court procedure built in for an association that won’t comply, and the side that wins gets its attorney fees paid. Whether that’s worth pursuing on any one file is a real judgment call, and it isn’t one to make off an article.
I’ve written before about what this certificate can do to the numbers on a short sale once it finally shows up. This is the other half of it: what happens before it shows up at all.
I’m not an attorney. Ask the closing agent what day the request went out, and ask a real estate attorney about the rest.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I’m licensed, and distressed property is most of what crosses my desk. Happy to answer questions wherever I can be useful.
JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if talking’s easier.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
I’m Behind on My Mortgage. Will the Bank Work With Me?
Maybe, and the honest answer is that “working with you” isn’t one thing. It’s four different things, they don’t do the same job to your loan, and you don’t get to pick which one lands on your file.
What Does “The Bank Will Work With You” Actually Mean?
Four options, and they’re not interchangeable.
A loan modification rewrites the loan itself, permanently. A payment deferral takes the payments you missed and parks them at the back of the loan, due when you sell, refinance, or pay it off. A repayment plan spreads what you owe across your future payments, on top of your regular bill, until you’re caught up. Forbearance pauses your payments for a while. The pause isn’t forgiveness. What you don’t pay during forbearance still comes due.
The servicer decides which one fits your file. You can ask, you can push back, but you don’t walk in and choose off a menu.
How Many People Actually Got Help Last Month?
The Federal Housing Finance Agency published its foreclosure prevention numbers for May on Thursday, covering loans owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. 15,855 foreclosure prevention actions completed, down from 17,201 in April. Inside that number: 6,616 permanent loan modifications, 5,389 payment deferrals, and 8,854 new forbearance plans started.
Those are national figures, Fannie and Freddie loans only. FHA, VA, and bank-held loans aren’t in them.
Is Forbearance the Same as the Debt Going Away?
No. Of the loan modifications completed in May, 63.1 percent involved what’s called principal forbearance: a chunk of what you owe gets set aside, stops drawing interest, and comes due later, usually when the home sells or the loan is paid off. Your monthly payment gets smaller. What you owe doesn’t.
That distinction is the whole thing to understand before you agree to anything. A smaller payment today and a debt that’s still there aren’t the same kind of help, and a servicer explaining your options over the phone isn’t always going to walk you through which one you’re looking at.
Why Did Fewer People Get Help While More Are Falling Behind?
Here’s the part that doesn’t add up on the surface. The number of loans in forbearance actually rose in May, from 37,517 to 37,644. But forbearance as a share of all delinquent loans fell, from 7.10 percent to 6.72 percent. That only happens one way: the total number of delinquent loans grew faster than the number getting help.
The 30 to 59 day delinquency rate moved from 0.94 percent to 1.03 percent the same month. Foreclosure starts kept falling, down 2.3 percent. More households are landing in the early stage of trouble, and fewer of them, proportionally, have anything in place yet.
Who Decides Which Option I Get?
Mostly, who owns your loan.
FHFA’s numbers only cover loans owned by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, and most people can’t tell you offhand which one holds theirs, or whether it’s either. Both run a free lookup, and both ask for the last four digits of your Social Security number to confirm it’s you, which is worth knowing before you go looking rather than after.
If your loan sits somewhere else, FHA, VA, or a bank that kept it on its own books, none of the numbers above describe your servicer’s options. The programs are different, and so is who to call.
Which of the four you’re offered, and what happens to whatever gets parked or set aside, usually comes down to two things: who owns the loan, and why you fell behind. A layoff reads differently to a servicer than an insurance jump does. That’s a conversation with your servicer, and if the paperwork gets complicated, one with an attorney too. I’m not either one.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what comes across my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR® referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather say it out loud.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR®, Momentum Realty. SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Even if you accept this offer and use our service, your lender may not agree to change your loan.
Does a Short Sale Hurt Your Credit Less Than a Foreclosure?
Probably not in the way most people mean it. Realtor.com’s economic research team looked at this in a July study and wrote that the credit bureaus score a short sale and a foreclosure similarly. The belief that a short sale is gentler on your credit score, they call a possible myth.
That finding runs against what a lot of websites will tell you, and I’d rather carry the published version than the comfortable one. What a short sale can actually do better for you sits in two other places, and both of them are worth more than a few points on a score.
What Does a Short Sale Actually Do Better?
Two things, per the same study.
First, the leftover debt. A short sale can come with a release from what’s still owed after the sale, if the lender agrees to one. That’s negotiated, never automatic, and forgiven debt can have tax consequences, which changed for a lot of people when the federal exclusion expired in January. A foreclosure in Florida can leave that leftover amount alive in ways a negotiated release doesn’t, because Florida is a recourse state.
Second, the clock on your next mortgage. The study puts the wait for a new conventional loan at roughly four years after a short sale, against roughly seven after a foreclosure. If the plan is to sell, rent for a while, and buy again when the ground is steadier, that’s about three years of difference. For most households that’s the number that matters, not the score.
Is Anybody Still Doing Short Sales?
More every year. Close to 30,000 closed nationally in 2025, and the growth is speeding up: about 4 percent from 2023 to 2024, close to 10 percent the next year, and roughly 16 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026.
Jacksonville sits near the top of that curve. Short sale transactions here grew 46.2 percent from 2024 to 2025, one of the fastest rates among the fifty largest metros. Tampa grew 64.3 percent.
They’re still rare, about four short sales for every ten foreclosure sales, and I wrote about why on August 8, along with the price crossover: since January, a short sale has recovered about 9 percent more of a home’s value than a foreclosure sale. That piece is on this blog if you want the full picture.
What’s the Honest Trade?
A short sale takes about two months longer to sell than a comparable listing and draws fewer buyers, because lender approval drags and sometimes falls apart. No lender is obligated to approve one. And the other side of the ledger hasn’t moved: a foreclosure lets an owner stay in the home without paying for an average of 592 days, while a short sale asks the owner to cooperate in their own move.
So the choice was never really about the credit score. It’s about whether a released debt and a four year wait are worth more to you than nineteen months of roof. That’s yours to weigh, and the parts that decide it, what you’d still owe, what the taxes look like, what your credit does in your specific case, belong with an attorney and a CPA. I’m neither one.
In other news, I pulled HUD’s list of FHA approved condo buildings this morning, and the Florida numbers are worth seeing in print.
What Does It Mean if My Condo Building Is Not FHA Approved?
It means the ordinary FHA condo loan can’t be written there. An FHA buyer needs the whole building approved, not just their own loan. The lender underwrites the association’s budget, reserves, insurance and finances, and if the project isn’t on HUD’s list, the standard loan doesn’t happen in that building.
As of this morning, 178 condo projects in all of Florida are on that list. Miami-Dade has 17, Broward 8, Palm Beach 2. Up here, St. Johns County has 12, Duval has 6, Flagler has 2, and Clay, Nassau, Baker and Putnam have zero each. Those are building counts, not unit counts, and the list moves as approvals are issued and expire.
FHA does have a narrower single unit approval path for buildings not on the list, with its own caps and conditions, so an unapproved building narrows the lane rather than closing it.
Can I Still Sell if the Building Isn’t on the List?
Yes. What changes is who can buy.
The first time FHA buyer is fenced out of nearly every building in the state. The conventional buyer now depends on the association’s paperwork surviving underwriting, since buildings of eleven or more units go through Fannie Mae’s Full Review as of August 3. What’s left after those two is cash, and cash buys at a discount. For an owner who’s behind on assessments and needs to sell, that buyer pool math is the practical meaning of the list.
On any condo listing, pulling the estoppel and checking the HUD list and the reserve documents in week one tells an agent who can even bid, before the price gets set.
Also of note today, Fannie Mae is selling delinquent mortgages again, for the first time in over thirteen months.
What Happens if My Mortgage Is Sold While I’m Behind on Payments?
Your options travel with the loan. That’s written into the terms of the sale itself.
On Wednesday, Fannie Mae announced a sale of roughly 943 deeply delinquent loans totaling $207.4 million in unpaid principal, plus a smaller pool of about 26 loans in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Bids are due in September, nothing has sold yet, and the announcement names no geography for the larger pool, so nothing here says Florida. The previous sale like this was announced in July of 2025.
The part a homeowner can use is in the fine print. Whoever buys these loans must honor any loss mitigation already approved or in process. They must offer delinquent borrowers a set of options, including loan modifications that may include principal forgiveness, before starting any foreclosure, except where the home is vacant or condemned. And if a foreclosure can’t be prevented, they must market the home to owner occupants and non profits before investors.
A letter saying your loan has a new owner lands hard when you’re behind. It isn’t a foreclosure notice, and it doesn’t erase anything you were already working on with the old servicer. The new owner is contractually required to offer the same road.
Jacksonville, Florida is my base and distressed property makes up most of my files. My license stops at the Florida line, so questions from anywhere else go out through the SFR® referral network to an agent licensed where you live. If any of this landed close to home, I’ll answer whatever you want to ask. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR® · Momentum Realty · SFR® (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Even if you accept this offer and use our service, your lender may not agree to change your loan.
Who Pays the Buyer’s Agent on a Short Sale?
Nobody publishes that number anymore. The buyer and their own agent agree it in writing, between the two of them, usually before they’ve walked through anybody’s front door. Whether any part of it comes off your side of the closing statement is a negotiation, and on a short sale your lender has to sign off on it.
That’s been the working rule since August 2024. On Wednesday an appeals court left it standing.
What Did the Court Actually Decide?
A three judge panel of the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the Sitzer-Burnett class action settlement on Wednesday, August 19.
The objectors made three arguments. That the plaintiffs didn’t have standing to bring the case. That the payout and the way it gets distributed weren’t adequate. And that home buyers should never have been included in the class at all. The panel rejected all three, and the November 2024 final approval stands. Both sides were heard at oral argument back in January.
That’s from the National Association of Realtors’ own newsroom, which is where I read it. I haven’t read the opinion itself, so nothing here is a description of the court’s reasoning.
NAR pays $418 million over four years. What that bought is a release of liability covering more than a million members, every state, territorial and local Realtor association, association-owned MLSs, NAR’s affiliate organizations, and every brokerage with an NAR member as principal that did $2 billion or less in residential volume in 2022. MLSs and brokerages that opted in were released too.
NAR’s note to members says the plaintiffs can still petition the Supreme Court. So nobody should be writing the word final yet.
Didn’t the Bank Just Pay Everybody?
That’s the answer sitting on page one of Google, and most of it was written a long while ago.
I ran this exact question through a search before writing this, the way somebody would at eleven at night. The results include a real estate blog post from 2009, two Reddit threads from 2012, a lawyer answer from 2014, and Google’s own AI summary at the top of the page saying the total commission, typically 5 to 6 percent, gets split between the listing agent and the buyer’s agent and approved by the bank.
That’s how it worked when those pages were written. What’s out of date is where the buyer’s agent’s number comes from.
The “bank pays” part was always a little loose too, and on a short sale that difference costs real money.
A short sale doesn’t have the money in it that a normal sale has. I went through this on the 11th: a normal closing pays the mortgage, the closing costs and the commission out of what the house sells for, and when the house is worth less than the loan, that math doesn’t reach. There’s nothing there to pay any of it with.
So the lender isn’t writing anybody a check. It’s agreeing to take less than it’s owed and release its lien anyway so the sale can close. Every line on that closing statement that comes off the top is a line that reduces what the lender walks away with, which is exactly why the lender reads all of them. Whether a lender approves any particular line is the lender’s call on their own file, and I can’t tell you how yours would go.
So Where Does the Buyer’s Agent’s Number Come From Now?
The buyer’s agreement with their own agent.
Written buyer broker agreements are mandated. A buyer signs one before an agent starts showing them houses, and that document is where the agent’s pay gets set. Offers of cooperative compensation can’t be communicated on a Realtor MLS, so there’s no posted number sitting on your listing for a buyer’s agent to look up.
What’s left is a negotiation with three parties in it instead of two. A buyer can ask you to cover some or all of what they owe their agent, the same way they’d ask for help with closing costs. If you agree to it, it shows up as a line on the closing statement. And on a short sale that line goes in front of your lender along with everything else.
Which is why the answer to who pays the buyer’s agent isn’t a number anybody looks up. It’s a term two people negotiated, on a document a third party has to approve.
Do I Have to Sign Something Before an Agent Will Show Me Houses?
Yes, and that’s the rule Wednesday’s order left alone.
If you’re buying, that agreement is where your agent’s compensation gets decided, and it gets decided before you’ve seen a house. Worth reading what it says about who’s expected to cover it. If the seller doesn’t, or the seller’s lender won’t, the document you signed is what answers the question.
If you’re selling and you owe more than the house is worth, this lands on you from the other direction. You’re not bringing cash to closing, so you’re not in a position to promise a buyer’s agent anything on your own. Anything you agree to is provisional until the lender says yes to it.
Is the Written Buyer Agreement Rule Going Away?
Not on Wednesday’s order.
On a short sale listing the compensation conversation happens twice. Once up front and in writing with each side, the way the rules require now. Again with the lender when the package goes up for approval. Neither one is a good place to be improvising. Might wanna have the buyer’s agreement in hand before that package goes up, rather than finding out what’s in it when the lender asks what the line is for.
Two years of agents have been waiting to see whether these rules got undone on appeal. As of Wednesday, they didn’t.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what comes across my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful, I’m not hard to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather say it out loud.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR - Momentum Realty - SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Even if you accept this offer and use our service, your lender may not agree to change your loan.
Are Houses Still Selling in Jacksonville, Florida?
Yes. And in July, Jacksonville was one of only ten metros in the country where the number of homes going under contract rose from a year earlier.
The national number went the other way. Contract signings fell 2.3 percent from June and 2.2 percent from July of last year, down to the lowest level since January. That’s the National Association of Realtors’ pending home sales report, released Monday morning.
Both of those are true on the same day, out of the same release. If you own a house in Jacksonville and you’ve been reading that the market has stalled, the local line is the one written about you.
What Did the National Number Actually Say?
Contract signings fell in all four regions from June, and in three of the four from a year ago.
Northeast down 2.0 percent for the month and 0.2 percent for the year. Midwest down 0.7 for the month, up 1.7 for the year, the only region in the black. South down 2.2 for the month and 3.0 for the year. West down 4.7 for the month and 7.1 for the year, the worst of the four by a distance.
NAR’s chief economist, Dr. Lawrence Yun, put the month on rates: “The highest mortgage rates of the year hit right in the middle of summer, and that’s pulling back contract signings.”
One thing worth pinning down before those regional numbers get used for something they can’t do. NAR’s “South” runs from Delaware to Texas and holds sixteen states. There’s no Florida line in it and no Jacksonville line in it. A 3.0 percent regional drop is not a statement about your street.
Where Does Jacksonville Sit on That List?
Ninth out of the fifty largest metros, up 1.2 percent year over year.
Inside the same release is a separate ranking of the fifty biggest metro areas by annual change in pending sales, and two Florida markets are on the top ten. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach is fifth at up 2.4 percent. Jacksonville is ninth at up 1.2 percent, tied with St. Louis. Virginia Beach leads the whole list at up 17.2 percent.
That metro ranking comes from Realtor.com Economics, which NAR credits in its own release. It’s a different measurement from the national and regional percentages above it, built by a different group, and the two shouldn’t be set against each other as though one disproves the other. The national index fell. A separate count of Jacksonville contracts rose. Those are two rulers, not an argument.
I ran this exact question through a search before writing, the way somebody in trouble would at eleven at night. Page one is Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com and Homes.com, all showing listings rather than answering anything, plus a local television piece from May asking whether Jacksonville is the worst large housing market in the country. That question and this week’s ranking are both sitting on the internet at once, four months apart, and nothing on that page tells a homeowner which one is current.
This one is current. It came out Monday.
What Does “Pending” Actually Mean?
A contract that’s been signed and hasn’t closed.
That’s NAR’s own definition, and its footnote says the sale usually finalizes within one or two months of signing. The same footnote names what stretches that gap: trouble getting the mortgage financing, a problem that turns up on the inspection, an appraisal that comes in somewhere nobody expected.
So a pending number is a forward-looking one. It’s contracts signed in July, most of which close in August or September. It’s not a count of sales that happened.
Which is why the two Jacksonville figures floating around this week don’t cancel each other out. What closed in July came from contracts signed in May and June. What went under contract in July shows up on the closed side this fall.
Why Does a Short Sale Take Longer Than One or Two Months?
Because a fourth party has to sign off, and NAR’s list doesn’t include that one.
On an ordinary sale the parties are the buyer, the seller and the lender making the new loan. On a short sale the seller’s existing lender has to approve taking less than the balance before anything can close. That approval runs on the servicer’s timeline, not yours and not the buyer’s, and it involves a valuation the servicer orders itself.
So the gap between signature and closing on a short sale runs longer than the one to two months NAR describes for a normal sale. Often much longer. The buyer has to be someone who’s willing to sit through it, and a buyer who isn’t told that upfront tends to leave around week six.
Whether any given lender approves any given short sale is that lender’s decision on their own file. Nobody can tell you in advance how yours would go, and anyone who does is telling you something they don’t know.
What Does “Fewer Buyers Are Bidding Above Asking” Mean if I Owe More Than It’s Worth?
It means the thing that used to close the gap isn’t showing up as often.
Yun’s second line in that release: “Home prices are at record highs so houses for sale are sitting on the market longer, and fewer buyers are bidding above the asking price than a year ago, though there are large local market variations.”
For most sellers that’s a mild inconvenience. For a seller carrying a shortfall it’s the whole ballgame. When a house lists at $300,000 and closes at $312,000, that $12,000 is what covers the difference between the payoff and the proceeds. Take the overbid out and the shortfall has to be dealt with some other way, which usually means the lender agreeing to eat it or the seller bringing money to the table.
Yesterday I went through the flat condo price line in Florida Realtors’ July statewide numbers, and this is the same problem wearing different clothes. When the price doesn’t move and the overbid doesn’t arrive, the option of growing out of the gap quietly disappears. That’s a slower thing than a crash and much easier to not notice for a year.
Is a Seven-Month Low a Reason to Stop Trying to Sell?
The national index says nothing about your house, and Yun said so himself in the release.
His own phrase was “large local market variations,” in the same paragraph as the bad number. Jacksonville is one of them this month.
He also gave a longer read, and it’s his forecast rather than a fact: pending contracts are running 30 percent below their pre-pandemic 2019 level while payroll employment is 5 percent above it, and he reads that gap as pent-up demand that should come out over the next few years as supply reaches the market and affordability improves. That’s an economist’s projection about a country, and it isn’t a timeline anybody behind on a payment can plan around. But it’s the honest counterweight to a headline saying signings are the lowest since January.
What Are My Options if the Sale Won’t Cover the Loan?
There are six, and they cost different things.
Catch up and stay, if the money’s there. Ask your servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way, if the price covers the loan and the closing costs. Ask the lender to take less than the balance through a short sale, if it doesn’t. Hand the property back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side of that.
Which one fits comes down to your equity, your income, your other debts, and what’s actually recorded against the property. A second mortgage somebody forgot about, an old contractor’s lien, an association balance, any of those changes the math before a buyer ever walks in.
What a short sale or a foreclosure does to your credit is a question for somebody who works in credit. What forgiven debt does to your taxes is a question for a CPA, and the federal exclusion that used to cover a lot of homeowners lapsed at the start of this year. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA, and both of those questions land outside what a real estate license covers.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what comes across my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful to you, I’m not hard to get hold of. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather say it out loud.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR - Momentum Realty - SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Even if you accept this offer and use our service, your lender may not agree to change your loan.
Are Florida Condo Prices Going Down?
Statewide, and as of the most recent print, no. They’re flat.
Florida Realtors put out its July 2026 statewide numbers yesterday. The condo and townhouse median sale price held steady at $295,000, the same as July 2025. Over the same twelve months the single family median rose 3.7 percent to $425,000.
Flat is not the good news it sounds like. But if you own a Florida condo and you’ve spent the last month reading that your unit is in freefall, the state association’s own July data doesn’t say that.
What Did Florida’s July Numbers Actually Say?
Seven figures came out of that release.
Single family closed sales rose just over 5 percent from July 2025. Condo and townhouse sales climbed 11 percent. New pending single family sales rose nearly 2.5 percent, which is the twelfth straight month of year over year growth. Single family inventory fell almost 13.5 percent. Condo and townhouse inventory fell just under 13 percent. Single family median sale price, $425,000, up 3.7 percent. Condo and townhouse median sale price, $295,000, unchanged.
That’s the eleventh month in a row of year over year sales gains in both categories. Those are Florida Realtors’ own roundings and I’m quoting them the way they wrote them, because “just over 5 percent” is what the release says and turning it into 5.2 would be inventing precision nobody published.
Chief Economist Dr. Brad O’Connor’s read on it is that the sales gains happened without a rate advantage. His words: “we’re increasingly seeing evidence that buyers are returning to the market even without a major improvement in mortgage rates.”
Why Did Houses Go Up 3.7 Percent and Condos Go Up Nothing?
Because a buyer looking at your condo is underwriting the building, not just the unit.
Condo sales rose 11 percent in July, which is more than single family did. Inventory came down almost as fast. Both of those normally push a price up. The price didn’t move.
What’s sitting on the other side of that is the association. The budget, the reserve balance, the master insurance policy, whatever assessment is pending or rumored. A buyer prices that in, and so does their lender. I went through the lender half of this on Sunday, when Fannie Mae’s Full Review change took effect for buildings with eleven or more units. Short version: the fast lane for condo project approval closed on August 3, and the association’s paperwork now gets read on a conventional loan.
So the unit competes on price and the building competes on paperwork. Twelve months of buyer demand went into that market and came back out as volume instead of value.
Why Does Every Search Result Say Condo Prices Are Crashing?
Because most of what’s ranking is either a different year or a different part of Florida.
I searched this exact question before writing. Google returned an AI Overview that says yes, Florida condo prices are falling significantly, facing their sharpest correction since the 2008 crash. The sources it cites for that are Reddit threads. Underneath it, page one runs a Substack newsletter, two more Reddit threads, a couple of YouTube videos and a Realtor.com piece from November 2025 built on August 2025 data.
The metros doing the heavy lifting in those numbers are Cape Coral, Fort Myers, Naples, Fort Lauderdale and Miami. Those are real declines in real places and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. They’re also not a statewide number, and they’re not Jacksonville.
Florida isn’t one condo market. A 2005 oceanfront tower in Southwest Florida carrying a structural assessment and a Northeast Florida garden condo two miles off the St. Johns are both “Florida condos” in a headline and almost nothing alike in a spreadsheet. When a national outlet blends them, the average lands somewhere neither owner lives.
A lot of the loudest numbers on that page are eleven or twelve months old. The July 2026 print is four days old.
Does Flat Actually Help Me if I’m Behind on a Condo?
Not much, and that’s what the “prices aren’t falling” framing hides.
Run it forward twelve months. Your unit is worth what it was worth. Your dues went up. Your share of the master insurance went up. If your building did a reserve study and funded it, an assessment showed up somewhere in there too. Every line moved except the one that would have given you room.
The statewide single family median moved 3.7 percent over the same twelve months. That’s a market number and not a promise about any one house, but at the median it’s roughly $15,000, and $15,000 is sometimes the whole distance between a sale that clears the loan and a sale that doesn’t. The condo median moved nothing.
Falling behind on a condo isn’t usually a story about the condo. It’s a job, a medical bill, a divorce, or an assessment that arrived the same month as something else. What flat prices do is take away the option of growing out of it. That’s a slower problem than a crash and it’s easier to not notice for a year.
What About Inventory Falling Almost 13 Percent?
That’s the one genuinely favorable thing in the release for somebody who needs to sell.
Fewer competing listings means a buyer working your price point has fewer places to go. For an ordinary sale that’s room to negotiate. For a short sale it matters more than that, because a short sale needs a buyer willing to wait out a lender’s approval process, and that buyer is a lot easier to find in a market where the alternative is nothing.
Inventory conditions move. That’s not a reason to hurry and I’m not telling anyone to. It’s a reason to know where you stand now rather than assuming next spring looks the same.
What Are My Options if the Numbers Don’t Reach?
There are six of them, and they cost different things.
Catch up and stay, if the money’s there. Ask your servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way if the price covers the loan and the costs. Ask the lender to take less than the balance through a short sale if it doesn’t. Hand the property back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side.
Which one fits depends on your equity, your income, your other debts and what your building’s paperwork looks like to an underwriter. Whether any lender agrees to any of it is that lender’s call on their own file, and I can’t tell you how yours would go.
What the credit and tax consequences are is a question for a CPA, and anything about your association’s documents is a question for a Florida community association attorney. I’m not either one.
In Other News
Florida’s attorney general rewrote the ballot language for the property tax amendment going to voters this November, after a Leon County judge ruled the original wording was misleading and that parts of it read “more akin to a political slogan.” The old title, “Save Our Homes From Excessive Property Taxes,” is gone. It’s now “Increased Homestead Exemption; Lower Cap on Increases in Non-Homesteaded Property Assessments.”
When Does the New Florida Homestead Exemption Actually Start?
2027 at the earliest, and only if it passes.
Nothing about this changes a 2026 tax bill. The amendment goes to voters on November 3, 2026, it needs at least 60 percent approval, and the first exemption increase applies to the 2027 tax year. The second one applies to 2028.
If you’re behind right now and you’ve heard property tax relief is coming, that’s the timeline. A vote, then a year.
What Would Actually Change?
Two things, on the non-school part of your bill.
The homestead exemption on non-school taxes would go to $150,000 in 2027 and $250,000 in 2028, indexed to inflation after that. The existing exemption on school taxes stays where it is, so the school portion of your bill isn’t touched either way.
Separately, the annual cap on assessment increases for non-homestead property, meaning rentals and commercial buildings, would drop from 10 percent to 5 percent, again outside school district taxes.
An exemption comes off taxable value, not off the bill. Removing another $100,000 of taxable value saves you whatever your local millage rate charges on $100,000, and that rate is set by your county, your city and your special districts, so the dollar figure is different in Duval than it is in St. Johns.
What if I Just Moved to Florida?
You’d wait five years for the bigger exemption, and the cutoff date is genuinely unsettled right now.
The original ballot title set it at establishing residency after January 1, 2027. The rewritten language filed last week uses December 31, 2025, and qualifies the whole provision with the phrase “to the extent permitted by the U.S. Constitution.” One of the plaintiffs who forced the rewrite, former state Senator Jeff Brandes, has said the five-year wait may be unconstitutional.
So the number is five years, the starting line has been written two different ways in two different documents, and there’s an open legal question sitting on top of it. Plaintiffs have ten days from the rewrite to challenge the new language. Mail ballots print in late August.
If your plan involves that exemption, might wanna keep an eye on which version survives rather than budgeting off a date you read once.
I work Jacksonville, Florida, and distressed property is the bulk of what crosses my desk. My license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, a question like this goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If any of it’s useful, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
What Can Cost Me My House Besides the Mortgage?
Two things turned up in Florida news last week, and neither one of them is your loan.
The first is insurance, which reaches your mortgage through escrow and can move your payment without your rate moving at all. The second is association dues, which reach your house through a lien and a foreclosure the association files itself, on its own track, with your bank nowhere in it.
Both stories cut against what most people assume about them. Here’s each one.
Why Did My Payment Go Up When My Rate Never Changed?
Escrow, almost every time.
If your taxes and insurance are escrowed, your servicer collects that money with your payment every month, holds it, and pays the bills when they come due. When the insurance premium goes up, the servicer pays the bigger bill out of an account that was funded for the smaller one. The account runs short.
Then the annual escrow analysis does two things at once. It raises your monthly escrow to cover the new premium going forward, and it spreads the shortage that already happened across the payments in front of you. That’s how a payment jumps a couple hundred dollars on a fixed-rate loan where the interest rate never moved.
I wrote about the extreme version of this on Thursday, the one where your servicer buys a policy for you and charges you for it. The ordinary version is just a renewal letter you didn’t budget for.
Didn’t Florida’s Insurance Market Just Get Better?
It did. Two state publishers said so in the same month and the numbers hold up. None of them describe your bill.
Citizens Property Insurance, the state-created insurer people end up with when nobody else will write them, is down to 278,196 policies in force as of July 31. A year earlier it was 782,424. That’s roughly two out of every three policies gone in twelve months, and the peak was 1,407,805 back in September 2023.
The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation put out its Property Insurance Stability Report on July 1, signed by Insurance Commissioner Michael Yaworsky. It’s a report the office has to file twice a year under state law, so it isn’t a press release. Reading it, three things stand out. The average homeowners premium including wind coverage went down in 51 of Florida’s 67 counties compared to the January report. Florida’s share of the country’s homeowners insurance lawsuits fell from 73.15 percent in 2024 to 41.29 percent in 2025. And for residential policies effective in 2024 or later, 44 companies have asked for a rate decrease while 48 have asked for no change at all.
Now the part that doesn’t follow.
Every one of those describes a market. Not one of them describes a household. An average premium falling in 51 counties means an average fell, and the office doesn’t claim it means your policy got re-rated downward. A rate decrease that 44 companies requested is a filing, not a bill. And Citizens shedding half a million policies means half a million households got moved to a private carrier that sets its own price. What happened to those individual bills isn’t something the state publishes, and I’m not going to guess at it.
What Does Homeowners Insurance Cost in My County?
Here’s the number the state does publish, and it’s the useful one. Average annual homeowners premium including wind coverage, as of March 31, 2026:
Baker $2,346. Flagler $2,488. Clay $2,540. Putnam $2,621. Duval $2,786. St. Johns $2,883. Nassau $3,051.
For scale at the other end of the state, Monroe runs $7,863, Palm Beach $6,323 and Miami-Dade $5,975.
Duval at $2,786 a year works out to about $232 a month. On an escrowed loan that money doesn’t arrive as its own bill. It’s already inside the payment you make.
One more thing from that report, because it’s the exception to the good news. Citizens still writes the majority of Florida’s wind-only homeowners policies. Wherever you read that the private market came back, it came back a lot less on wind.
What Can I Ask My Servicer For?
Three documents, and you’re entitled to all of them without anybody’s permission.
The escrow analysis, which is the actual statement showing what they collected, what they paid out, and what they think they need next year. Your insurance declarations page, which shows the premium they paid and to whom. And the shortage broken out as its own number, separate from the new monthly amount, because those are two different things stacked into one figure on your statement.
If your payment moved and your loan balance didn’t, escrow is where to look first. Escrow means taxes or insurance. Which of the two moved is a question that document answers in about a minute.
Can I Stop Paying My HOA Dues While I Fight Them?
You can. What it does is turn a disagreement into a lien, and the attorney quoted on this last week says it makes an owner harder to win for, not easier.
On Thursday the Daytona Beach News-Journal published Florida interviews on why association liens keep climbing here. Florida recorded 49,447 HOA lien filings in 2025, more than any other state and better than one in six of the 284,933 filed nationally.
The interesting part is that the professionals in the article don’t agree on why.
Brian Fox at Benutech, the firm that produced the lien count, gives the cost explanation. Insurance, common area maintenance, deferred maintenance and the reserve mandates that came after Surfside all landed at once, boards can’t run at a loss, so they assess hard and lien to protect the budget.
Joel McTague says that isn’t what he sees. McTague is a board-certified Florida HOA and condo law attorney with Frank, Weinberg, Black in Plantation, a former chair of the Florida Bar’s condominium and planned development law certification committee. What he’s seeing, in his words, is “more condo owners disagreeing with their condo association and refusing to pay condo fees,” and fighting over issues with the board rather than over special assessments. He describes a shift toward the attitude of “if I don’t pay, I can fight it,” and says that approach makes it more difficult for owners to prevail in a dispute with their association.
The article carries one more line, and I’ll say up front that the story doesn’t make clear which of the lawyers in it said the sentence: when representing unit owners, the advice is generally to pay the assessment and then fight whatever the association is doing in a separate lawsuit.
Bill Hughes at the University of Florida gives the version that reconciles the two. In his view the new laws don’t increase the cost of condo living, they force owners to face ongoing costs that used to get deferred. So somebody ends up funding thirty years of maintenance nobody paid for and next decade’s roof at the same time, and that owner is the one caught in the middle.
Why Does the Association Get Its Own Foreclosure?
Because the statute gives it one, and it runs separately from your mortgage.
Florida Statute 720.3085 says an association may bring an action in its own name to foreclose a lien for assessments in the same manner a mortgage of real property is foreclosed. Same courthouse, same kind of case, different creditor. Which means an owner can be perfectly current with the bank and still be a defendant in a foreclosure, because the association filed it.
Two other lines in that section are worth knowing before anybody decides to withhold on principle.
The first is that you can’t get out from under assessments by giving up what they pay for. The statute says an owner’s liability may not be avoided by waiver or suspension of the use of any common area, or by abandoning the parcel. Stopping the use doesn’t stop the bill.
The second is where your money goes when you start paying again. Any payment the association takes gets applied first to interest, then the late fee, then collection costs and attorney fees, and only then to the assessment itself. So somebody who withholds for a few months and then catches up can be paying every month and still watching the balance climb.
Nobody withholding dues to make a point sets out to end up in either place.
For agents working a Florida condo or HOA listing, this is the reason “there’s a dispute with the association” is a title question and not a side note on the intake sheet. Might wanna find out whether a claim of lien is recorded, and whether a case has been filed on it, before you’re three weeks from closing.
Isn’t There a Mediation Step Before Any of This?
For the argument, yes. For the money, no. That gap is the part worth understanding before anybody stops writing checks.
Florida Statute 720.311 requires an owner to demand presuit mediation before filing suit on a whole category of association disputes. Covenant enforcement. Changes to your parcel or to the common areas. Amendments to the association documents. Board and committee meetings. Access to the association’s official records. The wording of the demand letter is printed in the statute itself.
Then comes the sentence that matters here. Disputes subject to presuit mediation, the statute says, “shall not include the collection of any assessment, fine, or other financial obligation, including attorney’s fees and costs.”
So the thing you’re arguing about has a lane. The money the association says you owe doesn’t. Withholding doesn’t drag the assessment into the dispute where it can get mediated. It starts a second track running beside it, and that’s the track with the lien and the foreclosure on it.
Two other lines in that section are worth carrying around. Serving a mediation demand tolls the statute of limitations. And somebody who refuses to take part in the whole mediation process can’t recover attorney’s fees afterward, even if they win.
Whether your particular argument is one of the ones on that list is a question for a Florida community association lawyer, and it’s a real specialty.
Who Should I Actually Be Asking About This?
Depends which half you’re in.
Whether an escrow increase was calculated correctly, and whether you have anything to stand on if it wasn’t, is a lawyer’s question. So is anything about your association’s paperwork. What any of it does at tax time is a CPA’s question. I’m not an attorney and I’m not a CPA.
Where I’m useful is what happens if the bills stop working and the house has to be part of the answer. Catch up and stay. Ask the servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the ordinary way if the numbers reach. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale if they don’t. Hand it back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the far side. Each one costs something different, and which one fits is yours to pick.
Whether any lender agrees to any of it is that lender’s call on their own file. I can’t tell you how yours would go.
The thing that costs people usually isn’t the situation itself. It’s how late in the sequence they find out what the doors were.
Jacksonville, Florida is my market, and distressed property is the bulk of what I work. A Florida license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this somewhere else, a question like this one goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of it’s useful, I’m easy to get hold of. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Why Can’t a Buyer Get a Loan on My Condo?
If your building has eleven or more units, the short answer is that the shortcut your buyer’s lender used to take doesn’t exist anymore. As of August 3, the lender has to read your association’s budget, its reserves and its insurance before anybody gets a conventional loan in your building. That’s a longer look than most established buildings have had to sit through in years.
I sat down with the Fannie Mae letter itself this morning rather than the trade write-ups about it, because this one gets flattened into “condo lending got harder in Florida.” That’s true and it’s useless. The specifics are what tell you whether it’s your building.
What Changed on August 3?
Fannie Mae retired something called Limited Review.
Limited Review was the short version of condo project approval. For an established building, a lender could get a loan through on a thin look at the project instead of an audit of it. Loan applications dated on or after August 3, 2026, don’t have that option. Established projects that used to run through Limited Review now go through Full Review, or through a Waiver of Project Review where the building qualifies for one.
Two things about that date. It’s the application date, not the closing date. And Fannie Mae let lenders start early, so some may have been applying it well before August.
Does My Building Have to Go Through This?
Depends on how many units you have.
Fannie Mae widened the waiver at the same time it retired Limited Review. New and established projects with ten or fewer units can now qualify for a Waiver of Project Review. For a building of five to ten units there’s a condition attached: it can’t be part of a master association or a larger development.
So the practical line is eleven. Ten units or fewer and there’s a lane around the whole thing. Eleven or more and your building gets read.
The waiver isn’t automatic either. The project can’t be sitting at “Unavailable” status in Fannie Mae’s own project database, and it still has to meet the insurance requirements.
What Is a Lender Actually Reading in a Full Review?
Your budget and your reserves, and that’s where Florida buildings tend to run into it.
If your buyer’s loan officer comes back and says the building is “non-warrantable,” that’s the word for a project that doesn’t clear these rules. It isn’t a comment on the buyer. Their credit and their income can be perfect and it changes nothing, because the thing that failed was your association’s paperwork.
Fannie Mae tightened the reserve rules on the same August 3 date. When a lender leans on a reserve study to show a building has enough set aside, the association’s budget has to include the highest recommended reserve number in that study. Not a middle option, not the cheapest one that technically works.
The baseline funding method is out too. That’s the approach that lets the reserve balance drift down toward zero as long as it never actually goes below it. It’s an accepted way to fund reserves and Fannie Mae won’t take it anymore.
Is the Reserve Increase in Effect Now?
No, and this one is getting reported wrong all over the place.
The minimum reserve allocation for capital expenditures and deferred maintenance goes from 10 percent to 15 percent of the annual budgeted income assessment. That’s real and it’s coming. It applies under Full Review for loan applications dated on or after January 4, 2027.
That’s next year. Not the January that just went by, and not today. If somebody tells you your association is out of compliance right now on the 15 percent number, they’re a few months early.
Worth knowing the flip side of that. Almost every explainer you’ll find on condo reserves still quotes 10 percent, and for the moment those are right. That number has been the standard long enough that it’s baked into a lot of what’s written about this, and most of it hasn’t caught up to the January 4 date yet.
Will My Buyer Need Their Own Insurance Policy Now?
Possibly, and it’s a cost worth knowing about before it turns up at a closing table.
Fannie Mae capped the master policy deductible at $50,000 per unit for applications dated on or after July 1, 2026. That one already happened. Alongside it, where the master policy carries a per-unit deductible, the buyer has to hold an individual unit owners policy, and it has to cover at least the amount of that deductible.
Where an association runs a high per-unit deductible to hold the master premium down, that decision now lands on the buyer’s own policy. Their lender is going to check it.
Why Does an Assessment Turn Into a Financing Problem?
Because it’s the same building on both ends of it, and Fannie Mae wrote that chain down itself.
The letter says condo projects with inadequate reserves “typically do not have the requisite resources to maintain the physical condition of the project or to fund unexpected operating expenses.” Then owners “can experience substantial financial hardship from unexpected special assessments or higher regular assessments or dues, leading to mortgage default or foreclosure.”
Read that as one household sliding, not two separate groups of people. The reserves are thin. The roof still has to get done. The assessment goes out. Somebody who can’t cover it starts thinking about selling. And the building that produced the assessment is the same building that now has to survive a Full Review before that person’s buyer can get financed.
The thing that pushed them toward the door is standing in the doorway.
Does This Hit FHA and VA Buyers Too?
No. This is a Fannie Mae letter and it governs conventional financing.
FHA and VA run their own condo approval systems with their own rules, and nothing in this letter touches either one. If your building is FHA approved, that status isn’t affected by any of this.
Cash is the other one. A cash buyer doesn’t go through project review at all, because project review is the lender’s requirement and there’s no lender. That’s the whole reason a cash offer can close on a building where a financed one falls apart.
Did Anything Get Easier?
Two things, and both matter if you’re in a Florida building.
Fannie Mae dropped the requirement that new or newly converted Florida projects with attached units be submitted to PERS, its own project eligibility review service. Those can now be reviewed under the regular lender-delegated Full Review, same as anywhere else. It also retired the 50 percent investment property concentration limit in established projects reviewed under Full Review on investor loans. The 50 percent presale requirement on new and newly converted projects is still in place.
There’s one line in the letter worth reading out loud if you’ve been living with Florida’s condo carve-out. Retiring Limited Review, Fannie Mae says, “effectively retires the remaining geographic restrictions that apply to the state of Florida.” Florida had been treated as its own category on condo lending. It isn’t anymore. Same standard as everywhere else now, and the standard went up.
What Can I Look At Myself?
The two documents a lender is going to read, and you’re entitled to both.
The association’s current budget, and the reserve study if there is one. That’s what a Full Review turns on. The reserve line in the budget set against what the study recommends is close to the whole question, and you can ask the association for both without a lender or an agent involved.
What I can’t tell you is whether your specific building clears it. That’s a call an underwriter makes on your association’s actual paperwork and it goes different ways. What I can lay out is what a sale looks like with a building on the wrong side of a Full Review, what the other paths do, and what each one costs you. Which one you pick is yours.
If your building’s reserve numbers are thin and you’re thinking about timing, January 4, 2027 is the date to have somewhere in your head. Not as a reason to hurry. Knowing it’s out there is just a different position than finding out about it halfway through a contract.
I work Jacksonville, Florida, and most of what crosses my desk is distressed property. My license is Florida only, so if you’re reading this from another state, a question like this one goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you live.
If any of it’s useful, I’m easy to get hold of. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather just talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
My Foreclosure Case Was Dismissed. Can It Be Reopened?
Usually the dismissal is the end of that case. There’s one situation where it isn’t, and a Florida appeals court used it on Wednesday to reopen a foreclosure a trial judge had thrown out years earlier.
The situation is narrow. If a federal bankruptcy freeze was running on the day the judge signed the dismissal, that dismissal can be worth nothing. Not weaker. Void, meaning treated as if it never happened. And there’s close to no deadline on somebody going back and saying so.
I read the opinion at the court this morning rather than the trade story about it, because this is exactly the kind of ruling that gets flattened into “banks can reopen dismissed foreclosures.” That isn’t what it says.
What Did the Court Actually Do?
A lender filed a foreclosure in Indian River County. The lower court case number puts that filing in 2017. The case sat, and eventually the trial judge dismissed it for failure to prosecute, which means nobody moved it forward for long enough that the court closed it out.
Nobody caught the detail that mattered. When that dismissal was signed, a federal bankruptcy automatic stay was in effect.
About three years later the lender went back and asked the trial judge to set the dismissal aside as void. The judge said three years was too long and denied it. On Wednesday, August 12, Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeal reversed and sent the case back with instructions to grant the motion. The foreclosure is open again.
One thing before anybody reads too far into it. The Fourth District’s own notice says its decisions aren’t final until any timely motion for rehearing is disposed of, and they can be revised before publication. This is where it stands, not where it ends.
What Is the Automatic Stay, and Why Does It Make an Order Worthless?
When somebody files bankruptcy, a freeze goes up right then. It’s automatic on filing. Nobody has to ask a judge for it, and it stops most court action against that person while it’s in place. That’s 11 U.S.C. 362, and the opinion cites it.
Here’s the part doing the work. Anything a court does against the debtor while that freeze is running is void. Treated as if it never happened.
And the Fourth District pointed at its own older case law holding that this is true even where there was no actual notice of the stay. So nobody has to have done anything wrong. Nobody has to have known. The order is worth nothing either way.
How Long Can Somebody Wait to Undo It?
Longer than most people would guess.
The lender used Florida Rule of Civil Procedure 1.540(b)(4), which lets a judge undo a void order if the motion is filed “within a reasonable time.” The trial judge read three years as outside that. The appeals court disagreed, and it was blunt about why: “the passage of time cannot make valid that which has been void from the beginning.”
Quoting an earlier ruling of its own, the court said that when a judgment is void there is “almost no time limit” to move to vacate it. Then it pointed at a 2021 case where a lender waited five years and still got a void final judgment erased.
So “reasonable time” is doing very little work when the thing being attacked was void from the day it was signed.
Does This Mean Any Dismissed Foreclosure Can Come Back?
No, and this is the part that gets lost in the retelling.
That dismissal was void for one narrow reason. It was entered while a bankruptcy freeze was running. An ordinary dismissal for failure to prosecute, with no bankruptcy anywhere in the picture, isn’t void, and the rule the lender used here doesn’t reach it.
If no bankruptcy was open when your case was dismissed, this ruling isn’t describing your situation.
Is This the Same Thing as the Bank Refiling?
No, and the two get mixed up constantly.
Refiling is a lender starting a brand new foreclosure case after an old one went away. Almost everything written about dismissed Florida foreclosures is about that, and it has its own rules and its own limits.
This ruling is the other thing. Nobody started a new case. The lender went back and erased the paperwork that closed the old one, and the original case woke up where it left off.
Which one you’re looking at changes the whole question, and sorting that out on a specific file is lawyer work.
Does This Apply Where I Live?
Florida splits its appeals into district courts, and this is the Fourth. Indian River County sits inside it. Duval County does not.
The reasoning leans partly on a Second District case, which tells you the thinking isn’t confined to one corner of the state. Whether it binds a judge in your county is a separate question, and it’s a legal one. I’m not going to guess at it for you.
What Was Not Decided?
Almost everything a homeowner would want to know.
The appeals court reopened a case. It didn’t rule on the merits, it didn’t say the lender is entitled to anybody’s house, and it said nothing about whether the underlying debt or the right to foreclose is still enforceable now that the file is open again. That last one is its own question and the opinion doesn’t touch it.
The homeowner in that case is a real person, and nothing here predicts how it goes for her or for anyone sitting in the same spot.
Who Should I Ask If This Sounds Like My File?
The docket is where the answer starts. It’s public, it lives with the clerk of court in the county where the case was filed, and it shows how the case actually ended and what was signed on what date. If a bankruptcy was open at the same time, the dates are what show it.
That’s information, though. It isn’t an answer. Whether an old dismissal in your file is solid or vulnerable is a legal question, and it belongs with a Florida attorney who works foreclosure, not with me. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.
What I can lay out is how each path behaves inside an actual sale, and what each one costs you. Which one fits is yours to pick.
The thing worth taking out of this ruling isn’t fear. It’s that “the case got dismissed” and “the problem is gone” aren’t always the same sentence, and the difference between them is usually sitting in a file somebody can pull.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is the bulk of it. A Florida license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, that question goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Fewer People Fell Behind Last Quarter. The Ones Already Behind Slid Further.
The Mortgage Bankers Association put out its quarterly delinquency survey yesterday and the headline number improved. Fewer homeowners were behind on a mortgage at the end of June than at the end of March.
If you’re behind right now, that headline isn’t about you. There’s a second number underneath it that went the other way, and it’s been going the other way for a year.
The Number That Went Down
4.37 percent of home loans were delinquent at the end of the second quarter. That’s down 7 basis points from the first quarter, which is a small improvement, and up 44 basis points from a year ago, which isn’t.
Then it splits by stage, and the split is the whole story.
Loans one payment behind, the 30 day bucket, fell to 2.21 percent. Two payments behind, 60 days, fell to 0.73 percent. Three payments behind, 90 days, went up to 1.43 percent.
So fewer people started falling behind this quarter. More of the people who were already behind kept sliding.
The Numbers That Went Up
MBA tracks a separate figure they call seriously delinquent, which means 90 days or more past due or already in the foreclosure process. That one is 2.06 percent. Up 3 basis points on the quarter, up 49 on the year, and it has now risen four quarters in a row.
Marina Walsh, who runs industry analysis at MBA, said it plainly in their release: “Some loans are continuing to move to later stages of delinquency.”
The share of loans sitting in the foreclosure process went to 0.67 percent, up 19 basis points on the year. New foreclosure starts went down.
Those two moving in opposite directions is the part I’d look at twice. Fewer new files going in, more files sitting inside. That’s what it looks like when cases already in the system aren’t resolving.
What Changes Between 30 Days Behind and 90 Days Behind
Here’s the part that doesn’t make the news, and it’s the part that matters if you’re the one in one of those buckets.
The distance between 30 days behind and 90 days behind isn’t just two more months of stress. The options are different at each stop.
At 30 days, catching up is usually arithmetic you can still do. One payment and a late fee. The servicer’s list of what they can offer is wide open, and nothing has been filed anywhere.
At 90 days, the arrearage is three payments plus fees, and for a lot of households that’s past the point where next month’s paycheck closes it.
There’s also a clock running that most people don’t know about. Under the federal mortgage servicing rules, a servicer generally can’t make the first foreclosure filing until the loan is more than 120 days delinquent. That’s 12 CFR 1024.41(f), and I read it this morning rather than repeating what somebody said about it. There are exceptions written into the rule, including when the servicer is joining a foreclosure that another lienholder already started. HOA cases can land in that exception.
So 90 days sits about a month short of the earliest a case would normally be filed.
And there’s a piece of that same rule almost nobody brings up. If a complete loss mitigation application is with the servicer before that first filing, the servicer generally can’t make the filing while they’re evaluating it. The word doing the work there is “complete.” An application missing a document isn’t complete, and the protection doesn’t attach to one that isn’t.
I’m not an attorney, and how any of that lands on a specific loan is a legal question. But knowing the clock is there changes what a phone call to your servicer in month two is worth.
FHA Is Carrying Almost All of It
One more number, and it’s the one I’d take out of this report.
The delinquency rate on conventional loans is 2.72 percent. On VA loans, 4.89 percent. On FHA loans, 11.79 percent.
Year over year, conventional delinquency is up 12 basis points. VA is up 57. FHA is up 122.
On the serious delinquency measure the gap is wider still. Conventional up 6 basis points in a year, VA up 31, FHA up 227.
Walsh again, from the same release: “FHA serious delinquencies are becoming pronounced, increasing more than 225 basis points from the previous year.”
That isn’t a gap widening a little. That’s one loan type carrying most of the deterioration in the entire survey.
If you bought with an FHA loan in the last few years, you’re in the group those numbers are describing. That’s not a comment on anybody’s decision. FHA is the program built for buyers with less cash up front, so it’s the program that shows strain first when insurance and taxes and everything else climb.
One thing this survey does not say, and I want to be clear about it. There’s no Florida number in it. MBA named seven states with the largest quarterly increases and Florida wasn’t among them. Anybody telling you this release proves something specific about Florida is reading in something that isn’t on the page.
Where I Stop
Whether forgiven mortgage debt lands on you as taxable income is a tax question, and the exclusion that used to cover most of it lapsed at the start of this year. What any of this does to your credit is its own separate thing. Whether a servicer handled your file the way the rules require is a legal question.
I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA. Those go to the people who are.
What I can lay out is how each path behaves inside an actual closing. Catch up and keep the house. Ask the servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the normal way if the numbers reach. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale if they don’t. Hand it back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side. Each one costs something different, and which one fits is yours to pick.
Whether a lender agrees to any of it is that lender’s call on their own file. I can’t tell you how yours would go.
What the stage numbers in this survey say is that the population sitting at that second stop grew again, for the fourth quarter running. The thing that usually costs people isn’t the situation. It’s how far into it they are before they start asking questions.
Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is most of what I do. A Florida license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this somewhere else, that question goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.
Your Lender Can Buy Your Insurance for You, and One in Seven Deals Fell Through
Two things landed this week, a day apart. One is a warning about a bill most people don’t think about until it shows up. The other is about signed deals falling apart before they get to closing.
Your Lender Can Buy Your Insurance for You
Here’s something a lot of people don’t find out until it happens to them, and it’s worth knowing first.
If you fall behind, money gets tight, and the homeowners insurance is the bill you decide to let go, your mortgage doesn’t just sit there and wait. Somewhere in the documents you signed at closing is a clause saying you have to keep the property insured. If you don’t, your servicer can go buy a policy and charge you for it. It’s called force-placed insurance, or lender-placed insurance, and you don’t get to agree to it now. You already did, back at the closing table.
Two things about that policy. It costs considerably more than what you’d have paid buying your own. And it protects the lender’s interest in the building. Not your belongings, and not you.
Then there’s the mechanical part, which is where it really bites. That premium goes onto your escrow account. Your escrow account goes short. The servicer re-runs the escrow analysis and spreads the shortage across your coming payments, so your monthly number goes up. The bill you skipped to save a few hundred dollars comes back bigger, bolted onto the one payment you were trying to protect.
That’s the warning. Here’s what happened this week, which is why it’s on my mind.
On Wednesday the New York State Department of Financial Services announced a $15.5 million settlement with NewRez, joining state agencies in 46 other states. Regulators found the company had force-placed insurance on more than 4,200 borrowers who already had an active policy of their own. Not people who let coverage lapse. People who were covered, charged for a second policy on top of it.
Regulators put the consumer harm at $4.5 million. NewRez paid $4,511,242 of that back in restitution and owes roughly $11 million more in penalties and costs. The finding came out of a multi-state examination opened in 2022 that looked at how the company ran between November 2020 and October 2021. Regulators say it broke the servicing rules under RESPA’s Regulation X. NewRez doesn’t admit wrongdoing, and says the issue was identified years ago and has since been addressed.
So there are two ways this goes wrong and they both end in the same place. You let the coverage go and the expensive policy is a fair consequence. Or somebody’s records were wrong and it happened anyway.
Either way the tell is identical. If your payment went up and your loan balance didn’t, look at escrow. Escrow means taxes or insurance. The escrow analysis is a real document and you can ask your servicer to send you a copy of it. If insurance is what moved, the question to ask is whether you had your own policy in force on the day they charged you for theirs.
One in Seven Agreements Fell Apart Last Month
The other one came from Redfin on Tuesday, in their July housing report.
Fourteen percent of July’s home-sale agreements fell through. Highest share of any month since 2023. One in seven signed deals didn’t make it to a closing.
The rest of the report reads the same direction. Home sales nationally dropped 4.1 percent from June to 285,312, the lowest in nearly two years. Pending sales fell 2.5 percent. New listings hit their lowest level since October 2024. The median sale price was $407,730, up 3.2 percent from a year ago and the highest July on record. Redfin’s monthly average on the 30-year fixed was 6.54 percent, a one-year high. Chen Zhao, who runs economics research there, called it a mid-summer slump and pointed at record prices, rising rates, and people feeling less secure about money.
Jacksonville sits in the same table. Median sale price $376,089, up 0.6 percent. Homes sold down 1.2 percent, pending sales down 3.8 percent. Active listings down 16.8 percent, which is Redfin’s count and not the only count published for this market. And 70 days on market, nine days faster than a year ago, the second-biggest speed-up of any metro they track.
Put those together and you get a strange picture. Houses here are moving faster and there are fewer of them for sale. Nationally, more of the deals that do get signed are dying before they close.
Now the part that matters if you’re behind on payments.
On a normal sale, a buyer walking costs you a few weeks. You relist, you find somebody else, you go again.
On a short sale it can cost you the whole thing. A short sale is three to six months of getting a lender to approve a specific price for a specific buyer, and the approval letter is written to that contract. When that buyer walks, you’re not back at the start. You’re back at the start with less time before an auction date, a valuation that’s gone stale, and an approval that has to be rebuilt.
So a market where one in seven deals breaks is a market where the short sale timeline gets more fragile, not less.
The other half of it is who’s left buying. That 6.54 percent monthly average is the highest in a year, and the buyer who gets priced out first is usually the same buyer who was going to write on a distressed property.
None of that tells you to do anything. It’s a reason to ask harder questions about the buyer than about the price. On a short sale you can ask for proof of funds and a full underwriting approval before the offer ever goes to the lender rather than after. And you can ask out loud, before anything gets signed, what happens to your timeline if that buyer walks away.
Where I Stop
Both of these run into questions I’m not licensed to answer.
Whether a servicer’s escrow error gives you anything to stand on is a legal question. Whether forgiven mortgage debt lands on you as taxable income is a tax question, and the exclusion that used to cover most of it lapsed at the start of this year. What any of it does to your credit is its own separate thing.
I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA. Those three go to the people who are.
What I can lay out is how each path behaves inside an actual closing. Catch up and keep the house. Ask the servicer about a modification or a repayment plan. Sell the normal way if the numbers reach. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale if they don’t. Hand it back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run through the court and deal with what’s on the other side. Each one costs something different, and which one fits is yours to pick.
Whether a lender agrees to any of it is that lender’s call on their own file. I can’t tell you how yours would go.
The thing that costs people usually isn’t the situation. It’s the timing. Early in that sequence there are more doors open than there are late in it.
Most of what I work is distressed property, and I work it in Jacksonville, Florida. A Florida license stops at the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, that question goes out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.
If any of this is useful to you, I’m easy to reach. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk it through.
Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty, SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.
Momentum Realty is not associated with the government, and our service is not approved by the government or your lender.