What Three Missed Payments Actually Starts in Florida

The New York Fed put out its quarterly household debt report on Tuesday, and the headline on it says delinquencies held steady. One line in the table underneath went the other way. It’s the housing one.

That’s from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, in the Quarterly Report on Household Debt and Credit for the second quarter of 2026, published August 11.

The One Line That Moved

The Bank tracks something it calls the flow into serious delinquency. That’s the share of balances that newly went at least 90 days late during the quarter, annualized. Read that carefully, because it’s a share of dollars owed. It isn’t a count of people and it isn’t a count of loans.

Mortgage debt went from 1.29 percent a year ago to 1.52 percent now.

Now put that next to everything else in the same table. Home equity lines didn’t move at all, 1.15 percent both years. Credit cards moved four hundredths of a point, 6.93 to 6.97. Auto loans moved seven hundredths, 2.93 to 3.00.

Mortgage moved 0.23 points. That’s the biggest move on the table in the direction nobody wants, and it’s the housing line.

The all-in figure improved, from 2.91 percent to 2.57 percent, and that’s the number the headlines picked up. It improved because of student loans, which dropped from 12.88 percent to 7.83 percent. The New York Fed flags that one itself. Their words: student loan delinquencies “were an exception, with the continued impact of the re-reporting of defaulted student debt causing some distortions.”

So a reporting change on student debt is doing the work in the average. Underneath it, cards and autos and home equity lines barely twitched, and mortgages went up.

Joelle Scally, an Economic Policy Advisor at the Bank, put it this way in the release: “Delinquency rates across most products have held steady over the past two years. Still, new delinquencies for auto loans and credit cards remain at elevated levels, a trend we’ll continue to monitor.”

There is no Florida number anywhere in that report. It’s a national panel built from anonymized credit records, and I’m not going to turn it into a Florida figure it doesn’t contain.

Ninety Days Is the Front of the Pipeline, Not the Back

What I can tell you is what that mark actually starts here, because the sequence in Florida is longer than most people think.

Florida is a judicial foreclosure state. A lender can’t take a house here by handing paperwork to a trustee and posting a notice on the courthouse door. It has to file a lawsuit in circuit court, serve the homeowner, and get a judgment from a judge before a sale date exists at all.

Roughly how it runs. Payments stop. Somewhere in the first few months a breach letter shows up from the servicer with a window to catch up. Under federal servicing rules, a servicer generally can’t make that first foreclosure filing until the loan is more than 120 days delinquent, and there are narrow exceptions to that. Then the case gets filed, and a lis pendens goes on the public record against the property, which is the first piece of it a stranger can see. Then the case runs its course. Then a judgment. Then the clerk sets a sale date.

That’s months. Often more than a year, start to finish.

People get that wrong in both directions, and both hurt. Some assume the house is gone in thirty days and make a decision out of panic. Some assume nothing is happening because nothing has come in the mail, and burn through the part of the timeline where the most doors were open.

The number in the Fed’s table is describing somebody’s spring. The court end of it lands next year.

The Second Number in That Release

Same report, different table, and this is the one that changes the actual work.

Mortgage balances went down last quarter, off $74 billion to $13.117 trillion. Home equity line balances went up, $13 billion in the quarter to $459 billion. That’s $142 billion above the floor they hit in early 2022. Credit limits on those lines rose another $19 billion on top of it.

A home equity line is a second lien. It sits behind the first mortgage on the same house.

Here’s why that matters if a house ever has to sell short. A short sale needs every lien holder to release, and the first lender approving a payoff does not bind the second one. The second lender signs separately, on its own schedule, doing its own math on what it walks away with. On a house that’s already short, there’s usually not much left for it, and it can say no.

So a bigger pool of second liens means more files with two lenders in them instead of one. Two approvals, two timelines, two places for the thing to stall.

Nobody opens a home equity line thinking about any of this, and nothing about having one is a mistake. It’s a normal product used for normal reasons. It just changes what the paperwork looks like later if the numbers stop reaching.

Where I Stop and Somebody Else Starts

Everything above is sale mechanics, and that’s my end of it.

The questions that actually decide something for a person 90 days late are not sale mechanics. Whether a deficiency can follow you after the house is gone is a legal question, and Florida is a recourse state, so how that lands comes down to the judgment and the paperwork. Whether forgiven mortgage debt shows up as taxable income is a tax question, and the exclusion that used to cover a lot 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 an attorney and I’m not a CPA. Those three go to the people who are, and they’re worth asking before a decision gets made rather than after.

What I can lay out is how each path behaves inside a real closing. Keep paying and wait it out. 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 the house 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 a lender agrees to any of it is the lender’s call on their own file. I can’t tell you how yours would go.

The Part Worth Keeping

Falling three payments behind isn’t a character problem. It’s usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago, and that’s a lot of what a table like this one is made of.

The thing that costs people is the timing, not the situation. Early in that sequence there are more options on the table than late in it, and every one of them takes weeks to work through.

I’m in Jacksonville, and distressed property is where most of my week goes. A Florida license doesn’t cross the state line, so if you’re reading this from somewhere else, those questions go out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.

Happy to answer a question if one’s useful to you. 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.

Record $18 Trillion in Home Equity, and 813,000 Borrowers Who Owe More Than the House Is Worth

Two numbers came out of the same report on Monday. One of them is going to be everywhere this week. The other one is the one that matters if you bought a house in the last four years.

Intercontinental Exchange publishes something called the Mortgage Monitor every month. The August edition went out on August 10.

The Number That’s Going to Run Everywhere

American mortgage holders now hold $18 trillion in equity. That’s the most ever recorded, and it’s a second quarter 2026 figure.

Inside that total, ICE counts 47.5 million mortgage holders sitting on $11.7 trillion in tappable equity. Tappable means the piece you could borrow against and still leave 20 percent in the house. Averaged out across those 47.5 million, it’s about $212,000 apiece.

Prices are moving again too. Annual home price growth reached 1.5 percent in July, the fifth month in a row it picked up speed and the biggest single-month move since the middle of 2023.

All of that is accurate. It’s also an average, and an average doesn’t sit across the table from anybody.

The Other Number, in the Same Release

Roughly 813,000 borrowers owe more than their house is worth. That count is up 44 percent from a year ago.

That’s a national count, so nobody should read it as a Florida figure. But ICE says where it’s concentrated, and there are two states on that list. Texas and Florida, because that’s where prices have come down furthest from their peak.

It says who, too. FHA and VA borrowers, and people who bought between 2022 and 2025.

That tracks once you say it out loud. Somebody who bought in Jacksonville in 2023 with an FHA loan and 3.5 percent down started with almost no cushion. Prices ran hard, then flattened, and the first few years of any mortgage payment go mostly to interest rather than principal. There was never much equity built up to absorb a dip.

So two houses on the same street can land in different halves of the same report. Same street. Different closing year, different loan.

Being Underwater Doesn’t Do Anything Until You Sell

This is the part that gets lost. Owing more than the house is worth is not a default. Nobody calls the loan over it, nothing gets reported, and if you’re staying put and paying, it’s a number on paper.

It shows up when the house has to sell.

A normal closing pays the mortgage, the closing costs and the commission out of the sale price. When the house is worth less than the loan, that math doesn’t reach. There’s nothing there to pay any of it with.

That’s what a short sale is. The lender agrees to take less than it’s owed and release its lien so the sale can close. It isn’t a program anybody signs up for. Most people find out they need one somewhere between listing the house and reading the first offer.

Whether a lender says yes is the lender’s call, on their own file, and I can’t tell you how yours would go.

Two Documents Are Worth Having Before You List, Not After

If you bought between 2022 and 2025 with a low down payment and selling is on the table, there are two pieces of paper that answer the question early.

The payoff statement from your servicer, which is what you actually owe today including interest and any fees, not the balance printed on last month’s statement. And a real net sheet, which is the sale price minus every line that comes out of it.

Put those side by side and you know which half of the ICE report you’re in. That’s a different situation than finding out after you’ve accepted an offer, because at that point you’ve got a buyer, a deadline and a gap.

Getting one of each costs nothing but a phone call and an hour. Whether you use them is up to you.

What a Bank Sale Looks Like on the Far End

Same release, different figure, and it’s about what happens after the bank already owns the house.

Buyers of bank-owned property paid 27.5 percent below comparable sales in June. That’s one of the widest gaps measured in more than two decades. ICE says the widest discounts against each market’s own history are turning up in Florida, Texas, California and the Mountain West, while adding that there still aren’t many of these properties out there to buy.

That’s a discount to comparable sales. Not to an estimate, not to a Zestimate, to what similar houses actually traded for.

Sit with what that means for the person who used to own it. Whatever the house brings on the far side of a foreclosure is what gets applied to the debt, and 27.5 percent under comps means a lot less gets applied. Florida is a recourse state, so what happens to a leftover balance after that comes down to the paperwork and the judgment. That’s an attorney’s question, and I’m not one.

Where This Leaves You

If you’ve got equity, this report is good news and you can take it as such.

If you closed in the last four years with a small down payment, you’re in a group that grew 44 percent in twelve months, and that has nothing to do with anything you did wrong. Falling behind, or being short on a payoff, is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago.

The options in front of somebody who’s short aren’t complicated to list, even though none of them are pleasant. Stay and keep paying and wait for the gap to close. Bring cash to the table at closing. Ask the servicer about a modification. Ask the lender to take less through a short sale. Hand the house back through a deed in lieu. Or let it run to foreclosure and deal with what’s on the other side.

Each one costs something different, and the tax and credit pieces of that decision belong to a CPA and an attorney rather than to me. What I can tell you is how each one behaves in an actual closing, because that’s the mechanics of a sale and that’s my end of it.

Jacksonville is where I’m licensed and short sales are most of what I work. If you’re reading this somewhere else, a Florida license stops at the state line, so those go back out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.

Questions are free and I’d rather answer one early than late. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk.

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.

In Florida, Your HOA Payment Goes to Interest and Attorney Fees Before It Touches Your Dues

You can send your association money and watch the balance climb anyway. That isn’t a billing error and it isn’t the association being difficult. It’s written into the statute, and most owners find out about it after they’re already in it.

Where Your Money Actually Goes

Florida Statute 720.3085(3) covers homeowner associations. Section 718.116(3) covers condominiums. Same structure in both.

A payment the association receives gets applied first to any interest that has accrued, then to the administrative late fee, then to any costs and reasonable attorney fees incurred in collection, and then to the delinquent assessment itself.

Both sections say that order holds notwithstanding any restrictive endorsement or instruction written on the check. So “July assessment only” in the memo line does nothing. The statute already decided where the money lands.

Stack the other two numbers on top of that. Where the declaration or bylaws don’t set a rate, the statute allows 18 percent a year in simple interest. 720.3085(3) does say compound interest may not accrue, so that’s a real limit. Then an administrative late fee up to the greater of $25 or 5 percent of each late installment.

So somebody who falls behind, then starts paying again, can be current on cash flow every month and still losing ground on the balance. And once a collections attorney is in the file, those fees join the same stack and get paid before the assessment does.

That’s the part nobody explains until the letters start.

These Balances Start Smaller Than People Think

National Mortgage News reported in April on a 2025 count of HOA liens and put the amounts owed on them between $200 and $1,000.

Not a missed mortgage payment. A few hundred dollars in dues that got behind and then went to work on itself.

Cotality, the data firm that used to be CoreLogic, published its own analysis of HOA lien and foreclosure records on August 6. One finding in it is worth sitting with. The share of HOA liens that go on to a foreclosure filing held steady at roughly one in nine from 2022 through 2025. It didn’t spike. Associations aren’t pulling the trigger on a higher percentage of liens than they used to. There are just a lot more liens.

By Cotality’s count, Florida recorded 9,531 HOA foreclosure filings in 2025. Florida, Texas, Nevada, California and Arizona together accounted for 85.2 percent of every HOA foreclosure filing in the country that year.

A filing isn’t a lost house. It’s the start of a case. It’s also well past the warning-letter stage, and by the time one is filed the fee stack has been running a while.

Florida Builds Two 45-Day Notices Into the Process

720.3085(4)(a) says an association may not record a claim of lien until it has sent the owner a written notice of intent giving them 45 days to pay. The form of that notice is printed in the statute itself.

720.3085(5) says a suit to foreclose that lien may not be brought until 45 days after a second notice, this one a notice of intent to foreclose. And the second notice can’t go out until the first 45 days have run.

Two notices, both carrying language the statute spells out, before an HOA foreclosure suit can even be filed.

Condominiums run differently. 718.116(6)(b) requires 45 days written notice before a foreclosure judgment may be entered. And under 718.116(5)(b), a condo claim of lien expires one year after it’s recorded unless an action to enforce it has been started.

I’m not an attorney and none of that is advice about anybody’s particular file. What it does say is that the mail matters. Those notices carry statutory language and real dates on them, and they’re the record of where a file actually stands rather than where somebody remembers it standing.

The Estoppel Binds Them, and It Has a Clock

Florida Statute 720.30851 covers HOAs and 718.116(8) covers condos, and they read close to parallel.

The association has ten business days to issue an estoppel certificate after a written or electronic request from the owner, the owner’s designee, the mortgagee or the mortgagee’s designee. It’s effective for 30 days if hand delivered or sent electronically, 35 by regular mail. The fee is capped at $250 where nothing is delinquent, up to $150 more where there is a delinquency, and $100 more for delivery inside three business days. Those figures get adjusted every five years by CPI, with DBPR publishing the adjusted numbers.

Three provisions in there are worth knowing cold, and both statutes carry them.

The certificate binds the association. It waives the right to collect any money owed above the amounts specified on the certificate from anyone who relies on it in good faith, and from that person’s successors and assigns. 720.30851(3) and 718.116(8)(c).

Miss the ten business days and the association can’t charge the fee at all. 720.30851(4) and 718.116(8)(d).

The collection attorney’s contact information has to appear on the certificate, and no fee is permitted for providing it. 720.30851(1)(e).

On a short sale, that number is the line item that ends files quietly. The lender is already agreeing to take less than it’s owed. Whatever the association is owed still has to clear at closing, and by then that’s assessments, late fees, interest and legal fees in one figure. Price can be fine, buyer can be fine, and the estoppel still comes back thousands of dollars above what anybody budgeted.

Agents working one of these: might wanna order it the week the listing goes live rather than the week before closing. The effective window is 30 days and the itemized amount binds them, so an early one is worth something a late one isn’t.

The State Counted Its Condo Inspections and Came Up Short

Different problem, same paperwork.

OPPAGA, the Florida Legislature’s own Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, published Report 26-04 in July. It’s the first statewide look at how the milestone inspection law passed after Surfside is actually running. It got picked up by Florida outlets at the end of the month, and it’s worth reading rather than reading about.

Building officials reported 8,736 completed phase one inspections and 1,575 completed phase two inspections across 2024 and 2025, plus 1,587 extensions granted on initial deadlines. Ninety percent of the 2024 extensions and 98 percent of the 2025 extensions went to coastal counties and municipalities, with officials pointing at how hard it is to find an engineer and how backed up the ones they find already are.

Then the repair bills. Officials reported 903 permit applications for repairs identified in phase two inspections, running in value from under $1,000 to $30 million. The average permit value was $496,236 in 2024 and $337,229 in 2025. Concrete, electrical, structural.

Milestone inspections identified 30 buildings in 2024 and 24 in 2025 as unsafe or uninhabitable, across eight counties. Of the 30 in 2024, officials who answered indicated 5 were vacated.

Here’s the gap, and OPPAGA states it plainly rather than burying it. DBPR received 2024 data from 71 percent of the 389 local enforcement jurisdictions OPPAGA identified, and 2025 data from 64 percent. In the three counties with the most at stake, the counties reported and a lot of the cities inside them didn’t. 23 percent of Broward’s municipal building officials didn’t report. 21 percent of Miami-Dade’s. And 44 percent of Palm Beach’s.

OPPAGA also names a hole in the law itself. Section 553.899 doesn’t define “unsafe” and doesn’t define “uninhabitable.” The Florida Building Code defines unsafe and leaves uninhabitable alone. So officials used whatever they had, some the Building Code definition, some a local ordinance, some the engineer’s own call. Which means those unsafe-building counts aren’t counted the same way from one county to the next.

Every number in that report is a floor rather than a total, and OPPAGA says so on its own pages.

What You Can Actually Ask For

So the state database isn’t a due diligence source right now. The inspection itself is.

Section 553.899 requires the association to distribute a summary of the inspection to every unit owner, post it on the property, and publish the full report on the association website. It exists and it’s yours to ask for. Phase one report, phase two report if there is one, and the permit if repairs came out of it.

A phase two repair permit carrying a six-figure value is a special assessment that hasn’t been voted on yet. That’s not a prediction about any particular building. It’s just what that document is.

And if you’re already behind on assessments, the association is a separate creditor from your mortgage servicer, running its own clock and its own collection process. Falling behind on either one is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago.

What a lien does to what you’d owe, where it stands against your mortgage, what any of it does at tax time, those are questions for a Florida attorney and a CPA. I’m neither. Where I’m useful is the sale itself, because how an association balance behaves in a closing is deal mechanics rather than law, and that part I do every week.

Northeast Florida is where I’m licensed and distressed property is the bulk of what I work. If you’re reading this from another state, a Florida license stops at the state line, so those questions go back out through the SFR referral network to somebody licensed where you are.

Whatever the question is, ask it. 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.

Florida Files More HOA Liens Than Any Other State, and the Reserve Study Explains Why

Homeowner associations filed 284,933 liens against American homeowners last year. That’s up 8.6 percent from 262,446 in 2024. Benutech Data Insights, which pulled the property records for the full calendar year, framed it as one lien every 90 seconds.

Florida filed more of them than any other state, and it wasn’t close. 49,447 liens were recorded here in 2025, 17.4 percent of the national total, up 9.9 percent from 45,012 the year before. Florida, Texas, California, Georgia and Arizona together account for more than half of every HOA lien filed in the country. December was Florida’s outlier month, running 34.4 percent above December 2024.

If you own in an association anywhere in Florida, Jacksonville included, that number is worth having. But the count isn’t the useful part. The useful part is a second study nobody reads, which says where next year’s liens are coming from.

A Lien Is Not a Foreclosure

Worth getting this straight first, because the two words get used as if they mean the same thing.

A lien is a legal claim recorded against a property when an owner falls behind on assessments, fees or fines. It sits there. It doesn’t take the house. In many states it can be enforced through foreclosure later, and the rules for that are state-specific and technical enough that they belong to an attorney, not to me.

What a filing count measures is how many associations stopped asking and started filing. That is a different thing from how many people lost a home, and a different thing again from a delinquency rate. Any one of those three could move without the other two going anywhere.

Where Next Year’s Liens Are Coming From

Association Reserves is an engineering firm that prepares reserve studies. They went back through more than 100,000 of their own studies across all 50 states, covering 1986 through 2025, scored under the Community Associations Institute’s national standards.

Their finding: 74 percent of the associations in that set are less than 70 percent funded.

Seventy percent is the industry line for underfunded. The math behind it is simple. Percent funded is the reserve fund balance divided by what that balance should be, given the wear and tear the buildings have already put on the clock. A community sitting at 30 percent funded has saved thirty cents for every dollar of aging that has already happened. The roof is four years out either way. The money for it isn’t there.

Robert Nordlund, the engineer who wrote it up, put it this way: “74% of associations are teetering on the verge of needing special assessments or loans to perform their major repair or replacement projects in a timely manner.”

One thing to keep straight about that figure. It’s a sample of one firm’s own client studies, not a count of every association in the country. It’s a large sample and it’s the clearest public read I know of on the question, and it still isn’t a census.

Inside their own history, the underfunded share ran between 61 and 73 percent for most of the 39 years they measured. In the most recent two-year window of the study, which covers the high-inflation years and COVID, it reached 82 percent. Highest they’ve ever recorded. That window is a reading on those two years, not on today. They put the rise down to cost inflation and to closer scrutiny of buildings after the Champlain Towers South collapse in Surfside in 2021.

Here’s the sequence, and it’s the reason those two studies belong in the same article.

Reserves come up short. The roof still needs replacing. A special assessment goes out. Some owners can’t pay it. And the association can’t absorb the gap the way a mortgage servicer sometimes can, because it has no other revenue and no collateral interest to protect. So it files.

The Estoppel Is Where This Lands on a Sale

If a house in an association is being sold short, the association balance is the line item that kills the file quietly.

The lender is already agreeing to take less than it’s owed. Whatever the association is owed sits on that property too, and it has to be cleared at closing. Assessments, late fees, interest, and once the file has gone to a collections attorney, legal fees on top of all of it.

The document that decides the number is the estoppel. It’s the association’s written statement of what’s owed on the unit as of a specific date. Price can be fine. Buyer can be fine. And the estoppel can come back thousands of dollars higher than anybody budgeted, which sends the file back to the lender for a second approval it probably won’t get on that timeline.

Agents working one of these: might wanna order the estoppel the week the listing goes live instead of the week before closing. Nothing about that document gets easier by waiting.

And if you’re buying into an association, the reserve study and the percent funded figure are fair questions to ask. Most people never think to ask them. The answer tells you a good deal about what the next five years of ownership actually costs.

Ten States Went the Other Way

This isn’t one national wave, and it would be easy to write it as though it were.

Ten states filed fewer liens in 2025 than in 2024. New York was down 18 percent. Missouri down 14.6 percent. And the increases that did happen were lopsided: Louisiana up 178.9 percent, Colorado up 74 percent, Maryland up 29.7 percent.

Benutech’s own read on why the national figure moved is several things at once. A lot of HOA-governed construction went up across the Sun Belt after the pandemic. Non-mortgage housing costs have climbed. Special assessments are landing. And a lot of owners are sitting on mortgage rates they’d never get again, which narrows what they’re willing to do about any of it.

What This Actually Changes for You

Nothing about a national filing count changes the options in front of any one household. It says how common the pressure has gotten, and that’s all it says.

If you’re behind on assessments, the association is a separate creditor from your mortgage servicer, with its own timeline and its own collection process. Falling behind on either one is usually life landing hard on somebody who was doing fine a year ago.

The questions that decide what to do from here, what a lien means for what you’d owe, what happens to it in a sale, where it stands against your mortgage, what any of it does to your taxes, are questions for a Florida attorney and a CPA. I’m neither one. The lien priority question in particular is state law, and the honest answer is that it belongs with somebody licensed to give it.

What I can speak to is how that balance behaves inside a sale, because that part is deal mechanics rather than law.

Jacksonville, Florida is where I work, and distressed property is where most of my time goes. Outside Florida my license doesn’t travel, so those go out through the SFR referral network to somebody whose does.

Ask me whatever you want to ask. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk than type.

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.

For the First Time in Eight Years, a Short Sale Beats a Foreclosure on Price

Something crossed over in January that had never crossed before, and it went by almost unnoticed.

For most of the last decade, a house sold through a short sale went for a deeper discount than the same house sold out of foreclosure. That was just how it ran. Foreclosed homes moved in a fairly steady band, somewhere between 25 and 30 percent below what they were estimated to be worth, year after year. Short sales swung much wider and usually landed worse. About 30 percent below in 2018. Out to 50 percent below in 2022. Back in to roughly 20 percent by the start of this year.

Then the lines met. Realtor.com published a short sale study on July 16 that measured it: a distressed home now brings in roughly 9 percent more of its estimated value as a short sale than it does as a foreclosure. First time that’s been true since they started tracking it in 2018.

If you’re behind on a payment in Jacksonville, or anywhere in Florida, that’s a real number and it’s worth having. It’s also probably not the thing that’s going to decide anything for you, and I’d rather say that up front than sell you a headline.

Short Sales Didn’t Get Better. The Market Stopped Running Away From Them.

The reason for the flip is timing, not anything about the deals themselves.

A foreclosed home gets priced by the lender at the moment it sells. Whatever the market is doing that week, that’s the market it’s priced into. The discount tracks in real time.

A short sale gets priced much earlier, while the homeowner still owns the house. Then it sits pending for months while the lender decides. Through the fast price run-up of 2021 and 2022, the market simply outran those slow deals. By the time a short sale closed, the number on the contract was from a different market, and the discount blew out to 50 percent.

Price growth flattened through 2025 and into 2026. The lag stopped costing anything. The discount snapped back.

So nothing improved about short sales. The thing that was punishing them went away.

The 592 Days

Realtor.com asked the question that follows from their own finding, which is why short sales stay rare if they now bring the better price. Glen Morgenstern, an economist intern there, answered it without dressing it up:

“A short sale recovers more value for the lender and does less damage to the surrounding neighborhood, but the decision isn’t the lender’s to make. The homeowner controls the outcome, and a foreclosure lets them stay in the home without paying for 592 days on average. That free housing is worth more than any credit or timeline advantage a short sale offers, and the new pricing math doesn’t touch that calculation.”

That’s the whole thing in one paragraph, and it’s the most honest sentence in the study.

The price argument for a short sale just won for the first time in eight years. It’s still not the argument that wins the conversation, because on the other side of the table is 592 days of living in the house without making a payment. Nineteen months. For a household with nowhere obvious to go and no cash to go there with, that isn’t a technicality. That’s the roof.

I’m not going to pretend that math doesn’t exist, and I’m not going to tell you which side of it you belong on. That’s yours to weigh, and the pieces of it that actually matter, what you’d owe afterward, what it does to your taxes, what it does to your credit, are questions for an attorney and a CPA. I’m neither one.

How Small This Still Is

Worth keeping the scale straight, because the direction of a number and the size of it are two different things.

Fewer than 30,000 short sales happened in the entire country in 2025. That’s about 0.6 percent of all arms-length home sales, and 28 percent of distressed sales. They trail foreclosures by better than two to one, and the ratio has settled at roughly four short sales for every ten foreclosures. It has never once reached parity in twenty years of records. It climbed when the HAFA program pushed short sales as an alternative starting in 2010, then slid back after that program ended in 2016.

The direction is up, though, and it’s been up three years running. Short sale transactions rose 4 percent from 2023 to 2024, close to 10 percent from 2024 to 2025, and about 16 percent year over year in the first quarter of this year.

Florida Sits in This Differently Than You’d Guess

Here’s the part that surprised me. The map for short sales is not the map for foreclosures.

By share of listings, Lakeland, Florida leads the whole country at 6.7 percent. Pueblo and Colorado Springs, Colorado come next. By raw count of short sale listings as of May, Miami and Tampa sit in the same group as New York, Phoenix and Houston.

But measured by completed sales, short sales are most common in Salt Lake City and in Texas metros like Austin and Dallas. Listed in one place, closing in another. That gap between what gets listed as a short sale and what actually closes as one is its own story, and it lines up with something else in the study I’ll get to below.

Foreclosures concentrate in the most affordable markets. Short sales scatter across moderately priced metros in the West and in Florida. Two different pressures producing two different maps.

Meanwhile the Clock Is Getting Shorter

ATTOM’s Mid-Year 2026 report came out the same day, July 16. Properties that completed foreclosure in the second quarter of this year had been in the foreclosure process an average of 563 days. That’s the lowest since 2013, down 2 percent from the previous quarter and down 13 percent from a year ago. Seventh quarterly drop in a row, by ATTOM’s own count.

Two things about that number.

It is not the same number as the 592 days above, and the two should never be put next to each other and subtracted. ATTOM is counting days in the foreclosure process for homes that finished it. Realtor.com is counting time living in the home without paying. Different definitions, different publishers, different things being measured.

What they agree on is direction. The window is closing faster than it used to. ATTOM doesn’t publish a Florida-specific timeline in this release, so I’m not going to invent one for you. What ATTOM does publish for Florida is 27,494 foreclosure filings in the first half of 2026, one in every 373 housing units, up 32.65 percent from a year ago. Worst rate of any state in the country.

If You Do Go Down This Road, Two Things to Expect

The same study has two findings that don’t make anybody’s headline and matter more than the 9 percent does.

Short sale listings draw roughly 20 percent fewer page views on Realtor.com than comparable homes. Buyers see the words and scroll. And they take about two months longer to sell, weighed down by lender approval timelines that can drag out and sometimes fall apart before closing.

So the better price comes with a thinner buyer pool and a longer wait, on a file that already has a clock running on it. Whether that trade is worth making depends entirely on how much time you actually have, which is different for every household.

And no lender is obligated to approve any of it. That decision is theirs, every time, and anyone who tells you otherwise is telling you something they can’t know.

Where That Leaves Your Options

Same list it’s always been. A crossover in a pricing study doesn’t add or remove anything from it.

A regular sale, if there’s enough equity to cover the loan plus the cost of selling. A short sale, which needs your lender’s sign-off and comes with no guarantee of it. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which might come back as a modification or a repayment plan. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands somewhere different on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s finished. Florida is a recourse state, so a lender here can pursue a shortfall in ways it can’t everywhere. And the tax exclusion on forgiven mortgage debt expired on January 1 of this year, which moved the tax side of this for a lot of people.

What the study actually gives you is one fewer bad reason to rule a short sale out. For years, if somebody told you a short sale meant taking a worse price than a foreclosure would get, they were right. As of this January they aren’t. That’s the whole of it. It’s a small correction to one input, and it sits alongside everything else you’re weighing.

Falling behind is usually life landing hard on somebody who was doing fine a year ago. A pricing study doesn’t change that and it isn’t meant to. It just moved one number that a lot of people had wrong.

I work out of Jacksonville and distressed property is most of what lands on my desk. If you’re outside Florida, my license doesn’t travel, so those go out through the SFR referral network to somebody whose does.

Ask me whatever you want to ask. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or (904) 671-4161 if you’d rather talk than type. Nothing on the other end of it but an answer.

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.

Waiting on Rates Was a Real Plan for a Year. This Week It Stopped Being One.

For twelve months, if you were behind on a payment and you told yourself you’d hold on until rates came down and refinance your way out of it, there was an argument for that. Every single week of this year came in cheaper than the same week a year before. Not by much lately. But cheaper.

That ended this week.

Freddie Mac’s weekly survey printed 6.69 percent on the 30-year fixed for the week ending August 6. A year ago at this time it was 6.63. That’s the first week all year the number has come in higher than where it sat in 2025.

Six Basis Points Is Nothing. The Direction Isn’t.

Six basis points is six hundredths of a percentage point. By itself it’s noise, and nobody should reorganize their life around it.

What isn’t noise is how it got there. The gap has been closing all summer. At the start of July the 30-year was running about 24 basis points below the 2025 week. Then 20. Then 16. Then 6. This week it’s 6 the other way.

Here’s the last six weeks, same survey every time.

Week ending July 2, 6.43 percent.

Week ending July 9, 6.49.

Week ending July 16, 6.55.

Week ending July 23, 6.58.

Week ending July 30, 6.66.

Week ending August 6, 6.69.

Five straight weekly rises, 26 basis points since July 2. That’s the highest the 30-year has printed all year, and you have to go back to the end of July 2025 to find a week at or above it. The 2026 low was 5.98 percent back in February, so the move off the bottom is 71 basis points.

The 15-year went the other direction this week, down three to 6.01 percent. Worth knowing if a shorter loan is something you’d consider. Over the year it’s up 26 basis points, which is a bigger move than the 30-year made in the same stretch.

What This Does to the Waiting Plan

A lot of people who are behind have a plan, and the plan is usually some version of hanging on until the payment gets cheaper.

I’m not going to tell you that plan is wrong. It isn’t my call to make, it’s yours, and rates could go anywhere from here. Anybody who tells you they know where is guessing.

What can be said is this. The trend that plan was resting on ran in your favor for a year, and this week it didn’t. That’s not a prediction about next month. It’s just where the number is right now, and it’s different from where it’s been.

The other thing about waiting has nothing to do with rates at all. A file that sits gets harder, not easier. Late fees stack. The arrears grow. A lender that would have looked at a repayment plan at two months behind is looking at something else at eight. The auction is the loud part of this, and the quiet part happened a long time before it.

A Short Sale Sells to Whoever Can Qualify Today

If a short sale ends up being the road you go down, your lender’s approval isn’t the only thing standing there. A buyer has to show up inside whatever window the lender gives you.

That buyer pool is whoever can qualify at today’s rate. Pull 26 basis points of buying power out of it over five weeks and the pool gets a little thinner. On a file that already has a clock running on it, fewer qualified buyers isn’t a theory. It’s the thing that stalls the deal.

And nobody can promise you a lender will approve a short sale. That’s their decision, every time.

The Honest Other Side

Freddie Mac said in the same release that listing prices are modestly below year-ago levels and for-sale inventory is improving. Both of those help a seller find somebody, and both cut against most of what I just wrote. They belong in the same breath.

There’s also something about this survey almost nobody mentions. It’s a weekly average of conventional conforming purchase applications, from borrowers with strong credit putting 20 percent down. If you’re behind on a payment, or you’re going FHA, that is not the rate anyone is quoting you. It’s a direction. It isn’t your number.

The next print lands Thursday, August 13.

The List Is the Same List

A rate number doesn’t change your options, and it never has. Here’s what they are.

A regular sale, if there’s enough equity to cover what you owe plus the cost of selling. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval and carries no guarantee of it. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which might come back as a modification or a repayment plan. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands somewhere different on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so a lender here can come after a shortfall in a way it can’t in every state. And the tax exclusion on forgiven mortgage debt expired on January 1 of this year, which moved the tax side for a lot of people.

Which of those is right for you turns on legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA. Those answers belong with people who are.

Falling behind is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago. A weekly rate average didn’t cause that and it isn’t going to fix it. It just took one option and made it a little less reliable than it was last month, and that’s worth knowing before you’re counting on it.

Jacksonville, Florida is my market, and distressed property is the bulk of what I work. Questions that come in from other states go back out through the SFR referral network, because a Florida license is a Florida license and I don’t represent anybody outside it.

Email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com, or call or text (904) 671-4161, whichever you’d rather. Ask what you want to ask. There’s no obligation sitting on the other end of it.

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.

The Builder’s Price Cut Doesn’t Show Up in the Comps. Yours Does.

PulteGroup is the third largest homebuilder in the country and Florida is its strongest market. Last quarter it handed back 10.4 percent of the sales price to get houses closed. In what the company calls normal times, that number is 3.0 to 3.5 percent.

That’s not somebody’s estimate from the outside. Pulte’s chief financial officer, Jim Ossowski, said it on the company’s earnings call on July 22.

Here’s why it matters to a Florida homeowner who’s trying to sell, and why it matters a lot more if you owe more than the house is worth.

An Incentive Is a Price Cut That Doesn’t Look Like One

A builder usually won’t drop the sticker price. They pay for something else instead.

They buy the buyer’s mortgage rate down. They cover closing costs. They put upgrades in the house, the flooring or the counters or the lot.

The buyer walks away paying less in real terms. Sometimes a lot less. But the number that goes on the record is the sticker.

So a new construction closing lands on the books at what reads like full price, when the actual deal was tens of thousands cheaper than that.

The Number Has Been Climbing for Two Years

Same company, same measure every time, incentives as a share of the gross sales price.

Around 3.0 to 3.5 percent in normal times. 6.3 percent in the second quarter of 2024. 8.0 percent in the first quarter of 2025. 10.9 percent in the first quarter of this year. And 10.4 percent last quarter.

That last one came down half a point. Pulte said itself it isn’t expecting a sharp improvement from where it’s sitting, so nobody should read that half point as the thing turning around.

Run 10.4 percent against a round $500,000 sale and you get about $52,000. That’s arithmetic on a round number, not a figure Pulte reported. It’s there to give the percentage a size.

A Regular Seller Doesn’t Have That Lever

A builder has a forward commitment with a lender and can buy a rate down with it. You don’t have one of those. And if you’re underwater, there’s nothing to hand across the table at closing either.

The asking price is the only lever you’ve got.

So you cut, and you cut out in the open, and your cut is the one that lands in the record. The builder’s cut doesn’t.

Where This Lands on a Short Sale

A short sale doesn’t turn on what you think the house is worth. It turns on a number your lender picks.

The lender orders a valuation, usually an appraisal or a broker price opinion, and whoever does that work builds the number off recent sales nearby.

Those recent sales are the comps. If the new construction sales around you went on the books at prices nobody really paid, the comp set reads higher than the market actually is. The lender’s number comes back too high. The offer sitting on your table looks too low against it. And the file stalls.

That’s not a theory. That’s the room where these deals get argued.

The Concessions Are Usually Somewhere in the Record

Concessions don’t change the recorded price, but they do generally get disclosed somewhere in the transaction record. Which means they can be found.

Might be worth asking whoever’s representing you to pull the concessions on any new construction comp before that sheet goes to the appraiser or the BPO agent. A comp with $50,000 of buydown sitting inside it isn’t the same house as a comp without one.

That doesn’t guarantee anything. The valuation is the lender’s call and it stays the lender’s call. But an argument built on the transaction record is a different conversation than an argument built on an opinion.

Florida Is Where the Competition Is Heaviest

Pulte’s orders were up 19 percent year over year in Florida last quarter, and Ossowski credited part of the quarter’s better margin to “a greater mix of closings from higher-margin Florida markets.”

So the incentives are working here, the volume is here, and this is where a resale seller is going up against a builder who can pay a buyer’s way in.

One caution before anybody runs with 10.4 percent. That’s one public company reporting on its own business. It’s a big company selling a lot of houses in this state, and it still isn’t a measure of your street, your neighborhood or your county. Don’t take it as a number that describes your market.

Your Options Are the Same Ones They Were

A market number doesn’t change the list, and it never has.

A regular sale, if there’s enough equity left to cover what you owe and the cost of selling. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which might come out as a modification or a repayment plan. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each of those lands somewhere different on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so a lender can come after a shortfall here in a way it can’t everywhere. And the tax exclusion on forgiven mortgage debt expired on January 1 of this year, which moved the tax side for a lot of people.

Which one is right for you comes down to legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA. Those answers belong with people who are.

Falling behind is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago. A builder’s incentive budget didn’t cause that and it isn’t going to fix it. It just makes the comps read wrong on the way out, and that’s worth knowing before you’re in the middle of it.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and nothing waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Jacksonville Lost a Fifth of Its Homes for Sale. Asking Prices Fell Anyway.

Fewer houses on the market usually gets read one way. Supply is tight, so sellers hold their price.

That’s not what happened here.

Realtor.com released its July housing report on Monday. Out of the 50 largest metros in the country, the sharpest one-year drop in homes for sale was Jacksonville, Florida, down 20.0 percent. Biggest fall on the whole list. Nationally the number of homes for sale went the other way, up 2.1 percent.

And the asking price in Jacksonville came down 4.5 percent anyway. Price per square foot down 3.0 percent on top of that.

A fifth of the inventory gone, and the price down. Both of those moved the same direction, and that isn’t how the tight-market story goes.

What the Four Big Florida Metros Look Like

Homes for sale compared to a year ago, then the median asking price and how it moved.

Jacksonville: down 20.0 percent. $389,973, down 4.5 percent.

Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach: down 16.9 percent. $495,000, down 2.9 percent.

Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater: down 7.9 percent. $397,450, down 4.2 percent.

Orlando-Kissimmee-Sanford: down 4.1 percent. $419,450, down 1.8 percent.

Nationally: up 2.1 percent. $428,950, down 2.4 percent.

Miami had the second-sharpest drop in the country. San Francisco was third. So two of the three biggest inventory declines in the United States are in Florida, and asking prices fell in both.

One thing about those numbers before anybody runs with them. Those are median list prices. That’s what sellers are asking on homes sitting on the market right now, and it’s not what anything sold for. Sale prices are a different measure on a different set of houses over a different stretch of time. If you see a Florida median sale price quoted somewhere this month, don’t put it next to these. They don’t compare, and people compare them constantly.

Nobody Can Tell You Why the Count Fell

Here’s the part that matters more than the headline.

Realtor.com doesn’t break out where those listings went. Sold, expired, pulled off the market, or never listed at all, the report doesn’t separate them. So nobody can look at that 20 percent and say which one it was.

There are pieces of it in the same report. New listings in Jacksonville were down 4.1 percent, so less was coming in. Homes went under contract nine days faster than last July, so more was going out. Some of the drop is faster absorption and some of it is less new supply.

Past that it’s a guess, and it should stay one. I’d rather tell you the number is real and the reason isn’t known than hand you a story that sounds tidy.

Where This Actually Lands If You’re Behind

If you’re current on your mortgage and not going anywhere, this is a headline and nothing more.

If you’re trying to get out from under a house and you owe more than it’s worth, it touches something real.

A short sale doesn’t turn on what you think the house is worth. It turns on a number somebody else picks. Your lender orders a valuation, usually an appraisal or a broker price opinion, and whoever does it builds that number off recent closed sales and off what your house is competing with on the market right now.

When the active pool in a market shrinks by a fifth in a year, there’s less to compare against. Thinner comparisons are where valuations get argued. And the person on the wrong side of that argument is the seller who needs the number to work.

I’m not the one who decides that number, and neither is your agent. The appraiser or the broker doing the valuation decides it, and your lender decides what to do with it. That’s worth knowing going in.

The Price-Cut Number Is Doing Something Strange

One more line in the Jacksonville row is worth sitting with.

A quarter of the listings there are carrying a price cut, 25.5 percent. And that share is going the other way from the price. It’s down 3.6 points from last July, not up.

So sellers are cutting less often while asking prices fall. Could be that people are pricing closer to the market on day one. Could be a different mix of houses coming up for sale. Could be that the sellers who’d have cut already left. The data doesn’t say which, and I’m not going to pretend it does.

Jake Krimmel, a senior economist at Realtor.com, pointed at August as the month that tells you something. His words were that if cuts accelerate while pending sales weaken and sellers pull listings, that’s the more concerning combination.

Three things at once, not one. That’s the thing to watch, and it hasn’t happened yet.

If the House Is the Problem

The choices haven’t changed, and a market number doesn’t change them either.

A regular sale, if there’s enough equity left in it. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which might mean a modification or a repayment plan. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands differently on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real here in a way it isn’t everywhere. The tax exclusion on forgiven mortgage debt expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people.

Which of those is right for you comes down to legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA, and the answers to those belong with people who are.

Falling behind is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago. It isn’t a character problem, and a market that lost a fifth of its listings isn’t going to fix it or cause it either way.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR® referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and nothing waiting on the other end of it.

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 Property Taxes Reset When You Buy in Florida. The Listing Page Won’t Tell You That Until 2027.

If you’re shopping for a house in Florida right now, the property tax figure on the listing page is almost certainly the seller’s tax bill. Not an estimate of yours. Theirs.

On a house somebody has owned and homesteaded for fifteen years, those two numbers aren’t close.

Florida passed a law about this five weeks ago. It doesn’t take effect until February 1, 2027. So for the next six months, the number on the listing can still be the wrong number.

What the Law Does

HB 7031-E, the House Tax Package for the 2026 extended session, was sponsored by Representative Wyman Duggan, and it amends section 689.261 of the Florida Statutes. The House passed it 88 to 11 and the Senate 29 to 6 on May 29. It became law on June 29.

Starting February 1, 2027, an online residential listing site that shows an estimated property tax figure has to build that estimate off the listing price, using a method and data published by the Florida Department of Revenue. A site that doesn’t want to do that gets a second choice: stop showing the current owner’s taxes altogether and send you to the county property appraiser’s own estimator instead.

The push came from the Property Appraisers’ Association of Florida, with Pinellas County Property Appraiser Mike Twitty as the Association’s legislative chair. It started out as two separate bills, SB 856 and HB 827, before it got folded into the tax package.

The Warning Already Exists. It Just Shows Up Late.

Here’s the part most people don’t hear in time.

Section 689.261 has been on the books since 2004. It already requires a Property Tax Disclosure Summary, printed in capital letters, telling a buyer not to rely on the seller’s current property taxes, because a change of ownership triggers a reassessment and the taxes could be higher.

So the warning exists. It arrives at or before you sign the contract.

By then you found the house, ran the payment, decided you could carry it, and started thinking about where the couch goes. The number you ran was the one on the listing page. On a long-homesteaded property, that number belongs to the seller.

The Pinellas County Property Appraiser puts the mechanism plainly. Assessed value generally resets to market value after a change of ownership, “often resulting in property taxes that are significantly higher than the seller’s.”

The thing doing that has a name, and it’s the piece most people miss. Save Our Homes caps how much the assessed value of a homesteaded property can climb in a year. Florida’s county property appraisers describe the cap as 3 percent or the change in the Consumer Price Index. Sit on a house for fifteen years while the market runs, and the gap between what it’s worth and what it’s assessed at gets wide.

That cap belongs to the owner. Not to the house. It doesn’t come with the sale. When the deed records, the cap comes off and the assessed value resets to market.

How much that costs depends on the house, the county, and how long the seller had been sitting on that assessment. I’m not going to put a figure on it, because there isn’t one that’s true everywhere.

Why This Turns Into a Distress Story

A tax reset doesn’t hit you at closing. It hits the following year.

It shows up as an escrow analysis. The servicer recalculates what it needs to hold, finds it came up short, and the payment goes up to cover both the shortage and the new monthly amount.

That’s one of the quieter roads into falling behind, and it never looks like a housing story when it happens. It looks like a letter from the mortgage company.

Somebody who stretched to buy can find the payment they underwrote isn’t the payment they have. That isn’t a character problem. It’s a number that was on the page and shouldn’t have been.

If You’re Writing Offers Between Now and February

Nothing on the listing sites changes for six months.

Agents might wanna run the county appraiser’s estimator off the purchase price instead of the seller’s bill, and put the result in front of the buyer in writing before anybody signs. The statute already says a buyer shouldn’t trust the seller’s number. Being the person who showed them the real one is the whole job.

Every Florida county property appraiser runs its own estimator on its own site. Around Jacksonville that means Duval, Clay, St. Johns, Nassau, Baker and Putnam, and they’re six separate tools.

If the Payment Already Got Away From You

On a house bought in the last few years, this is worth asking about directly. If the seller bought from an owner who’d been homesteaded a long time, the jump could be part of why the payment stopped working. That doesn’t change what the choices are. It changes the story behind them, and the story matters when a hardship is being explained to a lender.

The choices are what they’ve always been. A regular sale, if there’s equity left in it. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands differently on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s done. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real here. The forgiven-debt tax exclusion expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people.

Property tax questions belong with your county property appraiser or a tax professional. The rest of it is legal, tax and credit territory. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

Falling behind is usually life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago. A payment that moved after the fact is one of the ways that happens.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Does Asking Your Servicer for Help Stop a Foreclosure? A Federal Rule Due This Month Would Change the Answer

Today the answer turns on a stack of paperwork most people never finish. A proposal sitting at the final stage would make it turn on the phone call instead.

Nothing has published yet. I’ll be clear about that up front, because the difference between a proposal and a law is the whole thing here.

What’s Actually Sitting There

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a rule at the final stage called Streamlining Mortgage Servicing for Borrowers Experiencing Payment Difficulties. It sits under Regulation X, which is the servicing side of the mortgage rules. The government’s own Unified Agenda lists the stage as Final Rule and the timetable entry as 08/00/2026. That reads August 2026, day not set.

I checked the Federal Register this morning. No CFPB document has published there since July 15. So it hasn’t dropped. It’s due, not done.

What it would finalize is a proposal published on July 24, 2024. The comment period closed that September. Two years ago.

How It Works Right Now

If you’re behind on your mortgage today, your protection against the foreclosure moving forward turns on one word. Complete.

A loss mitigation application is complete when your servicer has every piece of information it says it needs to review you for every option it has. Not most of it. All of it. And the servicer is the one who decides when that line has been crossed.

If a complete application lands more than 37 days before a foreclosure sale, the servicer has to stop certain foreclosure activity and evaluate you.

If it doesn’t land, the picture is different. Past the first 120 days of delinquency, the existing rules let a servicer start a foreclosure, keep one moving, or carry one through while you’re still working on the file. The CFPB’s own name for that is dual tracking.

So somebody who called in March, sent four documents in April, got asked for two more in May and is still chasing a bank statement in June is not protected by any of that effort. The clock kept running the entire time, because the file was never complete.

What the Proposal Would Do Instead

It removes most of the application framework, including all of the section that defines a complete application. In its place it puts something called a loss mitigation review cycle.

The cycle starts when you ask for help. That’s it. As long as the ask comes more than 37 days before a foreclosure sale.

Asking counts out loud or in writing. It has to come through a channel the servicer actually uses for servicing communications, so a comment on their Facebook page or a note scribbled on a payment coupon wouldn’t do it. A phone call to the number on your statement would. The CFPB says the term should be read broadly, and that a servicer should presume a delinquent borrower who makes contact is asking for help unless that borrower clearly says otherwise.

While the cycle is running, the servicer can’t make the first notice or filing that starts a foreclosure. It can’t move one forward that’s already going. And fees beyond what would have piled up on an on-time account stop.

The cycle keeps running through a forbearance and through a trial payment plan. It doesn’t end just because the trial failed.

For a homeowner, that’s the whole change in one line. The trigger moves from a document you might never get finished to a call you’ve probably already made.

Now the Part That Runs the Other Way

The cycle ends two ways.

The first is the one you’d expect. The servicer reviewed you for every option available, none are left, the required notices went out, and either you didn’t appeal in time or every appeal was denied.

The second one is quieter. If you haven’t communicated for at least 90 days while the servicer kept regularly trying to reach you, the cycle ends on its own.

Ninety days of not answering the phone. That’s the part that will close files, and it’ll close them for people who stopped answering because answering had stopped feeling like it helped. I’ve got no advice to give anybody about their own phone. It’s just worth knowing that under this version, silence has a length to it.

Small servicers would be exempt from most of this. And the 120-day period before a foreclosure can start at all doesn’t change.

The Caution, and I’m Putting It in Its Own Section on Purpose

Everything in the two sections above describes the 2024 proposal.

The final rule is not published. A final rule can come out different from what was proposed, sometimes a lot different, especially after two years of comments. Agenda dates slip routinely, and an August entry with no day on it is not a promise about August.

What’s verified is the status: final stage, August 2026 timetable, nothing published yet. The contents are a proposal, not the law. When it lands, the text is what matters, and reading the actual text is a job for an attorney, not for me and not for a blog post.

If you’re an agent working a short sale, the piece to watch is the 90-day provision. Whether the foreclosure clock keeps ticking while your package sits with the servicer is most of the job, and right now that question has a document-based answer. This would give it a conversation-based one.

What’s on the Table Either Way

None of this changes what the choices are if the payment is getting away from you or the loan is bigger than the house.

A regular sale, if there’s equity left in it. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which is the whole subject above. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands differently on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real here. And the forgiven-debt tax exclusion expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people.

Those are legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

One more thing, plainly. Falling behind isn’t a character problem. Most of the time it’s something that landed on somebody who was doing fine a year ago.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR® referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

FHA Just Put a Limit on How Many Times You Can Ask for Another Review

Two things worth knowing right now, and they point at the same thing. How much room you’ve got left.

One is a federal rule with a hard date on it. The other is a number about who is still able to buy a house without a lender.

Three Refusals and FHA Calls It a Failure

This one isn’t fresh news and I’ll say that up front. HUD issued Mortgagee Letter 2026-08 on June 23. Servicers can put it in place now, and they have to have it in place no later than September 21. That’s seven weeks out, which is why it’s here.

Two changes in it, and both land on somebody behind on an FHA loan.

The first is about trial payment plans. A trial payment plan, TPP, is the three months of payments you make before a permanent modification gets signed. Four months if you’re in imminent default, six if you took title through certain kinds of transfer. Under the new letter, if you fail to accept a TPP agreement a third time during the same default, that counts as a failure. HUD says why in plain words: to stop borrowers from deliberately refusing a plan over and over.

Here’s the part that catches people out. You don’t accept a trial payment plan by signing anything. You accept it by sending the first payment, in an amount equal to or greater than what the plan calls for. The servicer has to get you the agreement at least fifteen days before that first payment is due. So somebody sitting there waiting on paperwork to sign, who lets the payment date go past, has just not accepted it.

The second change is the bigger one.

The letter limits how many times you can send your file back in for another look in a way that stops foreclosure from starting. The new wording says a servicer may begin foreclosure after three full monthly payments are due and unpaid, once it has finished reviewing your first complete loss mitigation request, and any later complete request that followed a change in your circumstances.

“A change in your circumstances” is the phrase doing the work there. Sending the same file back in with nothing different in it no longer holds the clock.

Stay with me, because there’s a piece of this that isn’t in the general coverage.

The same letter says that when a trial payment plan fails and you aren’t eligible for another way to keep the house, the servicer has to evaluate you for Home Disposition Options. In FHA’s own handbook, home disposition is the exit side of the file, the pre-foreclosure sale and the deed in lieu. So the rule that tightens up the keep-the-house lane is the same rule that pushes the file toward a sale. There’s also an automatic 90-day extension written in, for the servicer to approve another option or to start or restart foreclosure after a TPP fails.

I’m not an attorney and I’m not a housing counselor. The letter is public and it’s short. Anybody whose file this touches might wanna read it, or put it in front of somebody who can advise on it.

None of that decides anything for you. What it changes is the timeline. If the plan has been to keep asking for another review while you work out what you actually want, there’s less room in that plan after September 21 than there is today. That’s a schedule, not a judgment on anybody.

Now the Other Number

NAR published its international transactions report on Wednesday. Foreign buyers bought 67,100 US homes in the twelve months from April 2025 through March 2026. The year before it was 78,100. Down 14 percent, and the second-lowest count NAR has recorded since it started tracking this in 2009. In dollars the fall is steeper, 19.1 percent, from $56 billion to $45.3 billion.

Florida drew 20 percent of those buyers, more than any other state. California was second at 19 percent, Texas third at 12.

Here’s the figure that sits on my beat. Forty-eight percent of foreign buyers paid all cash. Across all existing-home buyers it’s 28 percent. So this is the group that shows up without a lender, and it just got smaller.

One caution on the Florida piece. Twenty percent is Florida’s share of foreign buyers in this report. I haven’t verified last year’s Florida share, so I’m not going to tell you Florida specifically fell by any amount. What’s verified is that the national count dropped 14 percent, and Florida takes the biggest slice of whatever is left.

Lawrence Yun at NAR put the decline down to the same drop-off in international visitors and tourists, and said a slightly weaker dollar didn’t pull anybody back in.

Why a Condo Owner in Florida Should Care About Foreign Buyers

Because when a building can’t be financed, a cash buyer is the only buyer left.

That isn’t a theory in Florida right now, it’s most of the condo problem. Tomorrow, Monday August 3, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac retire limited review. Projects over ten units then take a full review, and a building that fails one is a building where a normal buyer’s loan gets declined.

If you’re the one trying to sell in that building, the buyer you need is somebody who doesn’t need a bank. A lot of those buyers have historically come from outside the country. There are fewer of them than there were a year ago.

Most of the condo coverage right now is about assessments, inspections and reserves, which is the cost side. This is the other half of it. Who’s actually left to buy the thing.

So two different things narrowing at the same time. If you’re behind on an FHA loan, the room to keep asking gets smaller on September 21. If you’re trying to get out of a condo that lenders won’t lend on, the pool of buyers who can close without one already got smaller.

What’s Actually on the Table

If the payment is getting away from you, or the loan is bigger than the house, the choices are the same ones they’ve always been and they cost different things.

A regular sale, if there’s equity left in it. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer, which is what that HUD letter is about. Or letting it run to foreclosure.

Each one lands differently on your credit, on your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s finished. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real here. And the forgiven-debt tax exclusion expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people.

Those are legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

One more thing, plainly. Falling behind isn’t a character problem. Most of the time it’s something that landed on somebody who was doing fine a year ago.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Sale Prices Are Near a Record. Asking Prices Just Hit a One-Year Low.

Redfin published its weekly housing numbers on Thursday, covering the four weeks ending July 26. Two figures in it sit about $15,000 apart.

The median sale price across the country was $407,752, up 2.8% from a year ago and roughly $2,000 short of the all-time high. The median asking price was $392,760, flat against last year and the lowest it has been in twelve months.

Same country, same four weeks, opposite directions. Both numbers are real. They’re measuring different things.

One of These Is Describing the Spring

A sale price is a closing. A closing that recorded in July was usually agreed in May or June, then it sat through inspections, an appraisal and underwriting for 30 to 60 days before it went on the books. So that $407,752 is a picture of what buyers and sellers agreed to two months ago.

An asking price is what a seller put up this week. Nobody has agreed to anything yet.

That’s the gap. One number is history and one is right now, and the one that’s right now is the one that came down.

If You Owe More Than the House Is Worth, This Is Your Number

Stay with me, because this is where it stops being trivia.

When you go looking up what houses “sold for” near you, you get the closed-sale number. It’s the flattering one and it’s the late one. What a buyer sitting in front of your listing is comparing against is closer to what everybody else is asking today.

On a short sale it shows up in one specific place. The lender orders its own valuation, usually a broker price opinion or an appraisal, and that valuation is built on closed sales. Closed sales describe the spring. The offer on the table came out of this week’s market. Those two can land apart, and when they do, that becomes the conversation with the lender. It’s a normal part of a short sale file, not a sign that anything went wrong. And nobody can tell you in advance where a lender comes out on it.

Same math on the agent side. If you’re pricing a distressed listing in Jacksonville off 60-day-old closings, you’ll sit above where live sellers are asking, and the lender’s valuation will argue with your contract. Might wanna pull the active asks alongside the comps before you set the number.

The Rest of the Week

Pending sales came in at 322,739, down 1.7% in a single week and the lowest in over three months. New listings were at their second-lowest level since the first week of January. Touring activity is up 15% since January, against 31% at this point last year. Buyers are moving. Fewer of them.

The daily average 30-year fixed rate touched 6.85% at the end of the prior week, the highest in over a year. That’s Mortgage News Daily’s number, and it’s a different series from the Freddie Mac weekly average you usually see quoted.

The median monthly housing payment fell to $2,575, its lowest in three months. Worth being clear about why. It didn’t fall because rates helped. It fell because asking prices came down.

What Florida Looks Like in the Same Table

Redfin’s list covers 50 metros. Orlando is one of seven in the country where the median sale price is below a year ago, off 0.3%. West Palm Beach is the biggest gainer anywhere, up 12.2%, with pending sales up 15.4%. Miami’s new listings are down 11.3% from last year.

Jacksonville isn’t in either the gainers or the decliners, so I’m not going to claim anything about it here.

What is true statewide: Florida still leads the country in foreclosure rate, with 27,494 filings in the first half of this year, about one in every 373 homes. That’s from ATTOM Data Solutions.

Where That Leaves You

If the payment is getting away from you and the loan is bigger than the house, the choices are the same ones they’ve always been, and they cost different things. A regular sale, if there’s equity left. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer. Or letting it run to foreclosure. Each one lands differently on your credit, your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real here. And the forgiven-debt tax exclusion expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people.

Those are legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

One thing worth saying plainly. Falling behind isn’t a character problem. Most of the time it’s something that landed on somebody who was fine a year ago.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Under $100,000, a Florida Storm Claim Is Mostly on Its Own

Candice Colucci practices in Clearwater and built much of her work around storm claims. She told Bloomberg she doesn’t take claims under $100,000 anymore. They don’t pay for themselves.

Read that as a homeowner instead of as a lawyer. If the damage is $40,000 and the insurer offers $9,000, there’s now no practical way to argue about it. Not because you’d be wrong. Because nobody can afford to be your lawyer over the $31,000 in between.

That’s the part of Florida’s insurance story most people have never been told, and Bloomberg spent Tuesday on it.

What Changed in 2023

Florida used to make the insurer pay the homeowner’s legal fees when the homeowner sued and won. The 2023 laws took that away. Now you pay your own lawyer out of whatever you recover.

Raymond Powers, a Florida trial attorney who represents property owners, told Bloomberg a homeowner can lose up to half a settlement to fees. That’s the math sitting under Colucci’s $100,000 floor. Below it, the fee eats the recovery, so the case doesn’t get taken.

That description of the fee change is Bloomberg’s reporting, published at Claims Journal on July 29. I’m passing it along as theirs, not reading you a statute.

Both Sides Are on the Record

Florida’s insurance commissioner, Michael Yaworsky, told Bloomberg the market was close to collapse at the end of 2022 and the laws fixed it. Robert Gordon of the American Property Casualty Insurance Association said cutting the lawsuits made the whole system work better. Universal, the state’s largest private insurer, said its denial rates have dropped a lot and its rates have been coming down since 2024.

The regulator’s own numbers point the same way. Florida’s Office of Insurance Regulation puts the statewide average premium with wind at $3,757, with premiums down in 51 of 67 counties. Citizens was at 293,465 policies in force as of June 5, its lowest in 25 years, and cut 2026 multiperil rates by 8.8% on average.

So here’s the honest version. Both of these can be happening at once. Premiums can be flattening while the money that shows up after a storm gets smaller and harder to argue with. They’re measuring different halves of the same policy. One is what you pay going in. The other is what you get coming out.

Twenty-Two Months Out of the House

Bloomberg’s own example. Jennifer and RJ Garbowicz had to demolish their St. Petersburg house after Helene and Milton hit two weeks apart in 2024. Their policy limit was $713,000. The offer was $2,279.41, per documents Bloomberg reviewed. They’ve been out of the house 22 months and they’re suing.

That file is above the $100,000 line. Which is why it’s still being fought at all.

How a Claim Turns Into a Listing

Here’s the part that reaches this beat, and it’s the part almost nobody connects, because the two events are usually about six months apart.

It runs like this. The claim closes short. The repairs don’t get done, because the money isn’t there. The house can’t be listed at full value with a damaged roof or open drywall, and a lot of the time a financed buyer can’t close on it at all. Meanwhile the payment keeps coming every month.

By the time that file lands in front of somebody like me, the insurance part is finished. Usually past appealing, past suing, past fixing. What’s left is a house worth less than the loan and an owner who didn’t do anything wrong.

Worth saying plainly: falling behind after a claim came up short isn’t a personal failure. That’s the machinery working the way it now works.

If you’re an agent in Jacksonville, or anywhere else in Florida, this is worth asking about early on any listing with storm history. Was there a claim, is it open or closed, and what actually got paid on it. Get that before you set a price, not after. It changes what the house can bring.

What You Can Do With This

I’m not an attorney, and I’m not going to tell anybody how to handle a claim. That conversation belongs with a lawyer who does this work, and the fee math above is exactly why finding one got harder than it was three years ago.

The housing side is mine, so here’s the shape of it. If a claim came up short and the payment is getting away from you, your options are what they’ve always been, and they cost different things. A regular sale, if there’s equity left. A short sale, which needs your lender’s approval, and nobody can promise you that approval. A deed in lieu. Loss mitigation with your servicer. Letting it run to foreclosure. Each one lands differently on your credit, your taxes, and on what you might still owe when it’s over. Florida is a recourse state, so that last piece is real. And the forgiven-debt tax exclusion expired on January 1 of this year, which changed the tax side for a lot of people. Those are legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

The one thing I’d flag is timing, and not because anybody needs to hurry. The number of options is widest early and gets narrower as the arrears grow. Most people find that out afterward.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go back out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Sources: Bloomberg reporting, read at Claims Journal, July 29, 2026, for the fee-shifting change and the quotes from Raymond Powers, Candice Colucci, Michael Yaworsky and Robert Gordon, and for the Garbowicz policy limit and settlement offer, per documents Bloomberg reviewed. Florida Office of Insurance Regulation property insurance stability report for the statewide average premium and county figures. Citizens Property Insurance for policies in force and the 2026 rate filing.

Two Numbers Landed Today, and Both of Them Are About Time

Two things came out today that don’t look related. Freddie Mac’s weekly mortgage survey at noon, and a read of the May home price index that a housing analyst published yesterday.

Put them next to each other and they’re the same story. Both are about a plan a lot of Florida homeowners are running right now without saying it out loud: hold on, and let time fix this.

Here’s what today said about that plan.

Mortgage Rates Hit 6.66%, the Highest in a Year

Freddie Mac publishes its Primary Mortgage Market Survey every Thursday at noon Eastern. Today’s print put the 30-year fixed at 6.66%, up from 6.58% last week. Fourth straight week up. The 15-year fixed came in at 6.04%, up from 5.96%.

A year ago the 30-year sat at 6.72%. So this is the highest reading anywhere in the last twelve months, without quite matching where it was last July.

Freddie Mac’s own comment on it pointed at inventory rather than rates. More homes available, more room to work with. That’s a fair read if you’re shopping.

It’s a different read if you’re behind.

Now, the Fed doesn’t set the 30-year, and nobody writing about it knows where it goes next, me included. But yesterday three Fed officials voted for a rate hike, and today the mortgage rate went up again for the fourth week running. If the plan has been to hang on until rates drop and refinance out of the problem, this week handed you two separate pieces of evidence that the door isn’t opening on your schedule.

Arrears don’t pause while you wait. The size of them is usually what decides whether there’s still room to do something other than watch an auction date show up. That’s what the plan costs. Whether it’s still worth paying is yours to weigh.

House Prices Are Near a Record and Down 4.8% at the Same Time

Both of those are true. The gap between them is where a lot of people lose a year.

Bill McBride at CalculatedRisk published his read of the May Case-Shiller index on July 29. In plain dollars, the national index and the 20-city composite are both sitting just under their all-time highs. Adjusted for inflation, the national index is 4.8% below its 2022 peak and the 20-city composite is 4.5% below. Both fell again in May. It’s been 48 months since real prices peaked. His own expectation for the rest of 2026 is roughly flat to slightly down in plain dollars, with real prices still falling.

Worth being precise about what that is. Case-Shiller national index, seasonally adjusted, May 2026 data, deflated by CPI. It’s a national series. It is not a Florida median sale price, and the two can’t be set against each other.

Here’s the part that reaches somebody who owes more than the house will bring.

Your payoff is a plain-dollar number. The bank doesn’t adjust your balance for inflation. So when a homeowner says they’re waiting for prices to come back, what they mean is plain-dollar prices. And plain-dollar prices are already about as high as they have ever been. There isn’t a coming-back left to do.

What has been falling for four years is what the house is worth measured against everything else you buy. That erosion is real, and it’s slow, and none of it touches what’s owed. Waiting doesn’t close that gap. It adds arrears to it.

There’s a tax piece here too, and it changed this year. The exclusion that used to cover forgiven mortgage debt expired on January 1. That’s a CPA question. I’m not one.

If You’re Behind in Florida

The options are what they’ve always been. A short sale. A deed in lieu. A regular sale if there’s equity left. Loss mitigation with your servicer. Or letting it run its course.

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 isn’t academic. Which one fits depends on your loan, your lender, and what your paperwork says. Most of what decides it is a legal, tax or credit question. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

What I can do is show you how each one actually works, and what timing does to each one. Then move with whatever you decide.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go out through the SFR® referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Sources: Freddie Mac Primary Mortgage Market Survey, week ending July 30, 2026; Associated Press via WSLS, July 30, 2026; CalculatedRisk (Bill McBride), “Inflation Adjusted House Prices,” July 29, 2026, on S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller national and 20-city indices, May 2026 data.

The Headline Number Is Almost Never Your Number

Three numbers landed on the Florida distressed-housing beat this week. A record, a discount, and a 9 to 3 vote.

Not one of them was measured on your street. That’s the reason for putting them in the same place. Each one is an average or a signal built out of thousands of different situations, and each one got read this week as if it says something about one specific house. It doesn’t. What’s happening underneath each of them does.

Three Fed Officials Voted for a Rate Hike Wednesday

The Federal Open Market Committee held the federal funds target at 3.50% to 3.75% on July 29. Sixth straight meeting at that level. The vote was 9 to 3.

All three who dissented wanted a quarter-point increase: Beth Hammack of the Cleveland Fed, Neel Kashkari of Minneapolis, and Lorie Logan of Dallas. Per CNBC and Bloomberg, that’s the first time since September 2016 that three policymakers broke in the same direction. The committee’s statement said economic activity is expanding at a solid pace and job gains are keeping up with the workforce, with uncertainty tied partly to conflict in the Middle East. Those three dissenters have been the loudest voices on the committee about inflation sitting above the 2% target for more than five years running.

Now, the Fed doesn’t set mortgage rates. It moves the bond market that does, and that relationship is loose. Nobody, me included, knows where the 30-year goes from here.

Here’s the part that reaches an actual homeowner. A lot of people behind on a Florida mortgage have been running a plan that goes “hold on until rates come down, then refinance out of this.” Wednesday was not a point in favor of that plan. Three votes for a hike is the opposite of the signal that plan needs.

Waiting isn’t free. Every month of it is another month of arrears, and the size of the arrears is usually what decides whether there’s still room to do something other than watch the auction date show up. That’s the cost of the plan. Whether it’s still worth paying is yours to weigh, not mine.

Foreclosed Homes Are Selling 27.2% Below Value

Realtor.com put out a foreclosure market report on July 7 that hasn’t gotten much air in Florida.

The median foreclosed home sold for 27.2% below its estimated value. That estimate comes from Realtor.com’s own valuation model rather than any government source, so read it as their number. Foreclosure listings climbed to their highest level in six years, 1.3% of all homes for sale in April 2026, closing in on the 1.7% share from April 2020. Those listings are pulling 26.5% more page views than the average listing while sitting 11 days longer.

Their own economists framed the rise as a return to more normal conditions rather than a crisis, and the history backs that up. The median discount on bank-owned property has run roughly 20% to 35% since 2018. 27.2% sits near the middle of that range.

So what does it mean for somebody in it? A house that goes the whole way through foreclosure and comes out the other side as bank-owned tends to sell for about a quarter less than it’s worth. That’s the far end of the process, and it’s measurable. Most homeowners have never been shown it.

Florida is a recourse state. What’s left over after a sale is what a lender can potentially come after. So the size of that gap at the far end isn’t academic.

A short sale is not automatically a better number, and anybody who promises you one is guessing. No lender is obligated to approve anything. What’s actually different is when it happens. A short sale puts a buyer, a price and a lender at the table while you’re still in the room. The 27.2% gets set after you’ve left it. Which one lands better in your file depends on your loan, your lender, and what your paperwork says about a deficiency. I’m not an attorney. That last question belongs with one.

Florida’s Record Median Price Is Hiding a Split

Florida Realtors’ June report put the statewide median single-family price at $432,000, up 4.9% year over year, with sales now on a ten-month growth streak. Condo and townhouse median rose 1.7% to $305,000. That’s confirmed, and it’s a record.

Now the other half. These are two different measurements, so I’m going to keep them apart. Momentum Realty’s housing research desk tracks Zillow’s home value index across all 67 Florida counties. In its July 6 release, covering Zillow data through May 2026, 46 of the 67 counties sat below their year-ago value, along with 683 of 801 ZIP codes. Charlotte County was down 9.6% on the year at a typical value of $298,142, which is 22.3% off its peak. Lee County was down 7.3%, with active listings down 20.1%. Statewide, that same index had the typical Florida home at $392,443, down 3.0%.

So one number is a June median sale price and it set a record. The other is a home value index through May and it’s falling. A median sale price says what actually changed hands last month. A value index estimates what homes are worth. Both can be right at the same time, and Zillow’s index is a model rather than a record of transactions, so it belongs in the estimate column. That’s Momentum’s own research desk, which is my brokerage, and worth saying out loud.

The direction is consistent with other things that have crossed this beat in the last week. Cotality had Cape Coral at 11.1% negative equity on July 28, and Parcl Labs had Charlotte among the five most motivated counties in the state on July 26. Both of those are private estimates rather than government data, and both point the same way.

Here’s why the split matters more than either number on its own. A statewide median is an average of very different places. Somebody in Port Charlotte reading a record-price headline probably ends up with a picture that has little to do with the offer on their own house. That gap is where people lose months. A lot of them assume there’s equity because the state says prices are up, and by the time real comps get run, the arrears have grown.

Naming the county fixes most of it. Not the state, not “Florida.” The county, and then the street.

The Part That Applies to You

Three numbers, three different sizes of map. A national policy signal, a national median discount, a statewide median price. None of the three came from your block.

If you’re behind on a Florida mortgage, your options are what they’ve always been, and they cost different things. A short sale. A deed in lieu. A straight sale if there’s equity left. Loss mitigation with your servicer. Letting it run its course. Each one lands differently on your credit, your taxes, and what you might still owe when it’s over. The forgiven-debt tax exclusion that used to cover a lot of this expired on January 1 of this year, so that part changed too. Those are legal, tax and credit questions. I’m not your attorney and I’m not your CPA.

What I can do is show you how the process actually works, what each option looks like from the inside, and what timing does to each one. Then move with whatever you decide.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states, and those go out through the SFR® referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation, and no pitch waiting on the other end of it.

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.

Sources: Federal Reserve FOMC statement, July 29, 2026; CNBC and Bloomberg, July 29, 2026; Realtor.com foreclosure market report, July 7, 2026, via PR Newswire and Florida Realtors; Florida Realtors June 2026 housing report; Move With Momentum Housing Research, Florida Housing Market Tracker, July 6, 2026 release, Momentum Realty analysis of Zillow Research data through May 2026 (county and ZIP figures); Cotality; Parcl Labs.

Two Dates in August and One Number That’s Older Than It Looks

Three things landed on the Florida distressed-housing beat this week. Two of them are dates on a calendar, both inside the next seven days. The third is a number that got heavy national coverage and is actually from the first quarter.

They look unrelated. They aren’t. Every one of them is about timing, and timing is usually the part that costs people the most.

The Condo Loan Door Narrows on August 3

On August 3, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac retire something called limited review.

Limited review was the short version of the check a lender runs on a condo association before approving a conventional loan. After August 3, nearly every condo project with more than 10 units goes through full review instead. Reserves, insurance, association finances, all of it examined. The required reserve funding also moves from 10% to 15%, with another step planned for early 2027. This comes out of Fannie Mae Lender Letter LL-2026-03 and Freddie Mac’s matching bulletin, both dated March 18, 2026.

Here’s the Florida piece. AD Mortgage gave its own origination numbers to Mortgage Professional America on July 24. Of 1,434 conventional Florida condo loans they’ve originated since 2021, 757 used limited review. That’s 52.8%. In 2025 alone it was 394 loans through limited review against 245 through full review. The path that’s going away is the one more than half of their Florida condo buyers were using.

On reserves, two figures worth keeping separate. AD Mortgage looked at 82 condo projects by manual lender certification in the twelve months ending June 19, and 25 of them, 30.5%, had reserve funding below the new 15% threshold. That’s a count from their own file. Separately, NAMB president Kimber White estimates roughly 80% of Florida condos don’t meet even the current 10% threshold. That one is an estimate, not a count, and it’s worth reading as one.

What this does to a condo owner is simple enough. If a building can’t clear full review, the buyers who need a conventional loan can’t buy in it. What’s left is cash buyers and non-QM lending, which costs the borrower more. A smaller buyer pool usually means a lower price. And if you’re already behind and the sale needs your lender’s approval, a lower price means a bigger gap for them to sign off on.

There’s a second edge to it. A reserve shortfall doesn’t stay on paper. It usually comes back as a special assessment, four figures and sometimes five, landing on owners who are already stretched.

If you own a condo and you don’t know where your association’s reserves actually sit, that’s a question you’re entitled to ask them, and the answer is yours to have.

Florida’s Late-Payment Number Went National This Week

Two national pieces put Florida’s late-payment picture in front of a wide audience on July 27 and 28.

The first was produced by Offerpad and distributed by Stacker, and it ran in dozens of local outlets: 7.05% of home loans in Florida had late payments reported to credit agencies in the first quarter of 2026, 3.87% higher than the fourth quarter of 2025.

Now, the caveat, because it matters. That’s first-quarter data. The Mortgage Bankers Association released it back in May. What’s new this week is the coverage, not the number. Second-quarter figures aren’t out yet. If you read a headline this week and thought something just happened, it didn’t.

The second piece has more weight. ABC News ran its own analysis of ATTOM data. Foreclosure filings nationwide were up 21% in the first six months of 2026 against the same period last year, and up 28% against 2024. Florida posted the highest average number of yearly foreclosure filings per ZIP code of any state since 2020, ahead of New Jersey, Delaware, Nevada and South Carolina.

Per ZIP code is a different measurement than per housing unit, and it lands harder. It says these filings are concentrated in neighborhoods rather than spread evenly across the state. If you’re behind on payments in Jacksonville or in Clay County, you’re probably not the only house on your street in that position.

That’s worth sitting with, because a lot of people going through this are convinced they’re the only one. That belief is usually what keeps somebody from picking up the phone until the clock has already run out. Falling behind on a mortgage isn’t a character flaw. Most of the time it’s life landing hard on somebody who was fine a year ago.

Three Historic Buildings, One Auction Site, August 5

The Laura Street Trio in downtown Jacksonville is set for a court-ordered foreclosure auction at 11 a.m. on August 5, at duval.realforeclose.com.

The Trio is three buildings at northeast Laura and Forsyth: the Florida Life Insurance building, the Bisbee, and the Marble Bank. They were among the first structures built after the 1901 fire and have sat vacant for decades. The city of Jacksonville filed the foreclosure suit in November 2024 against Laura Trio LLC and Red Oak Capital Fund II LLC, alleging $827,500 owed in municipal code violation fines. Indiana-based Becovic Management Group took over the mortgage in February 2026, and its owner has said he still intends to acquire and redevelop the buildings.

Foreclosure gets talked about like it only happens to people who made bad decisions with their money. Here’s a set of historic downtown buildings, backed by a capital fund, going through the same door, on the same website where a house on the Westside ends up. The process doesn’t sort by who you are. It sorts by whether the payments stopped and how long the clock has been running.

Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, so a court has to sign off before any of this happens. That takes time. And that time is the part most people don’t hear about early enough to use it.

Where This Leaves You

Two of these have a date on them. The third has a lag on it. All three point the same direction, which is that the useful window on a distressed property almost always opens earlier than people realize and closes quieter than they expect.

If you’re in it, you have options, and they cost different things. A short sale, a deed in lieu, a straight sale if there’s equity left, letting it run its course. Each one has a different effect on your credit, your taxes, and what you owe afterward. Florida is also a recourse state, so what happens to any leftover balance comes down to the paperwork. I’m not an attorney and I’m not your CPA. Those two questions belong with people who are.

What I can do is walk you through how the process actually works and what each option looks like from the inside, and then move with whatever you decide.

I’m based in Jacksonville and licensed in Florida. Questions come in from other states too, and those go out through the SFR referral network, because I don’t represent anybody outside Florida.

If you’ve got a question, email JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or call or text (904) 671-4161. No obligation and no pitch on the other end of it.

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.

Sources: Fannie Mae Lender Letter LL-2026-03 and Freddie Mac Bulletin, March 18, 2026; Mortgage Professional America, July 24, 2026; Mortgage Bankers Association Q1 2026 National Delinquency Survey; ATTOM Data Solutions midyear 2026 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, via ABC News; Stacker and Offerpad; Jacksonville Daily Record and News4JAX.

One Company Says Underwater Mortgages Are Almost Gone. Six of the Ten Worst Metros in America Are in Florida.

Last week a major housing data firm published a report saying negative equity has become, in their words, a near-obsolete concern. Nationally, they have a case. Their number says 1.9% of mortgaged homes in this country are worth less than the loan against them, down from 26% at the bottom of the last crash.

Then you look at the metro list from a different dataset, and six of the ten most underwater metros in America are Florida metros. Jacksonville is number six.

Both of those things are being reported at the same time about the same country. Here’s how they fit together, and what it means if you bought a Florida house in the last four years.

What the National Number Says

Cotality, the firm formerly known as CoreLogic, released its Homeowner Equity Insights report on July 23 with first-quarter 2026 data. Homeowners with mortgages hold $17.9 trillion in equity nationally. Across 56.7 million properties, the average borrower has about $310,500 in equity. Underwater properties dropped 9% from a year ago, roughly 106,000 homes. About 1.09 million homes are underwater, or 1.9% of mortgaged properties.

That’s a real number from a real dataset, and it’s genuinely good news for most of the country. Their chief economist, Selma Hepp, even describes all that equity as golden handcuffs, meaning people are sitting on so much of it that they won’t move, which slows the market down.

One thing worth knowing before you go further: these are proprietary estimates from private companies, not government data. Each firm runs its own model to guess what a house is worth and compares that guess to the loan balance. That’s not a knock on them. It’s just what the numbers are.

A Second Dataset Points the Other Direction

ICE Mortgage Technology pulled its own read from loan servicing data and gave it to Lance Lambert at ResiClub, published in Fast Company on July 4. Their figure: 1.5% of outstanding US mortgages were underwater at the end of May 2026, up from 1.0% in April 2025.

That’s about a 50% jump in thirteen months. Cotality says the count fell 9% over roughly the same stretch.

I’m not calling either one wrong. They measure different things. Cotality counts mortgaged properties against a current estimated value. ICE counts outstanding mortgages out of servicing records. Different periods too, first quarter versus end of May. Two careful firms can run different models and land in different places.

But if you live in Florida and you read “near-obsolete,” you should also see the second number.

The Metro Table Is Where the Average Falls Apart

ICE broke its data out across the 100 largest metros. Here are the ten with the highest share of mortgages currently underwater, as of that July 4 publication.

1. Cape Coral-Fort Myers, Florida: 11.1%

2. 2. Lakeland, Florida: 7.8%

   3. 3. San Antonio, Texas: 7.7%

      4. 4. Austin, Texas: 6.6%

         5. 5. North Port, Florida: 5.3%

            6. 6. Jacksonville, Florida: 4.1%

               7. 7. Tampa, Florida: 4.0%

                  8. 8. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: 3.5%

                     9. 9. Dallas, Texas: 3.5%

                        10. 10. Deltona, Florida: 3.0%

                            11. Six Florida metros in the top ten. Cape Coral is at 11.1%, which is more than five times the national figure Cotality published.

                            12. The bottom of that same list is the mirror image. Bridgeport, Connecticut and San Jose, California sit at 0.1%. Boston and Los Angeles at 0.2%.

                            13. So when somebody quotes you 1.9% or 1.5%, ask which house they’re talking about. A national average blends Cape Coral and San Jose into one number, and that number describes neither place.

                            14. Two more details from Lambert’s work matter more than the headline.

                            15. It’s concentrated by when you bought. The damage sits almost entirely with people who bought in 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025. Cape Coral prices are down 18.9% from peak in that dataset. Austin is down 27.3%.

                            16. It’s concentrated by down payment. Lambert points at FHA and VA borrowers who put down as little as 3.5%. When you start with that little cushion, a modest price drop puts you underneath.

                            17. The Footnote That Matters Most

                            18. Buried in Lambert’s own asterisk is the part that describes most of the people who call me.

                            19. Some homeowners are not technically underwater. They have a little equity on paper. But once you subtract what it actually costs to sell a house, they still can’t close without bringing money to the table.

                            20. Those people don’t show up in the 1.5%. They don’t show up in the 1.9% either. On paper they’re fine. At the closing table they’re short.

                            21. If you bought in the last four years with a small down payment, that’s the math to run before you assume you’re okay. What’s the house worth today, what’s the payoff on the loan, and what does it cost to sell. That third number is the one people leave out.

                            22. What That Looks Like on One Street

                            23. Yesterday afternoon a housing analyst with a big following posted a specific Gulf Coast listing in Manatee County. New construction, built in 2023, bought for $568,000. It’s on the market now at $425,000. That’s $143,000 below what the buyer paid three years ago.

                            24. He estimates the mortgage at roughly $470,000, which would put the owner about $45,000 underwater before a single closing cost. His post says the home is being sold as a short sale.

                            25. I’ll be straight about what I know here. The listing and the price history are verifiable. The mortgage balance is his estimate, not a public record, and the short-sale designation came off the listing page rather than something I pulled myself. Treat both as reported.

                            26. I’m not naming the address or the owner, and I’d ask you not to go looking. That’s somebody’s house and somebody’s hard year. The situation is the useful part, not the street.

                            27. Because that’s what Cotality’s statistics and ICE’s metro table look like when they land on one family. A 2023 buyer, thin on down payment, in a Gulf Coast county, now well underwater.

                            28. Three Things Nobody in That Comment Section Mentioned

                            29. The post got a quarter million views. The replies were mostly people arguing about whether the market is crashing. Nobody said any of this to the seller.

                            30. Florida is a recourse state. After a short sale, unless the lender puts a waiver in writing, they can come after the difference for up to five years. The waiver is not automatic. It’s a negotiated term, and it’s the single most important sentence in the approval letter.

                            31. The tax break expired. The Qualified Principal Residence Indebtedness exclusion, which kept forgiven mortgage debt from counting as taxable income, ended January 1, 2026. Forgiven short-sale debt is taxable again unless something else applies, like insolvency or a written agreement dated before this year. That’s a CPA conversation, not a real estate agent conversation, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

                            32. A short sale and a foreclosure are not the same outcome. Realtor.com data reported by National Mortgage News on July 16 shows short sales recovering about 9% more of a home’s estimated value than foreclosures do. That difference goes somewhere. Sometimes it’s the deficiency you don’t owe.

                            33. And one clarification that matters, because these three words get used interchangeably and they shouldn’t be. Underwater means you owe more than the house is worth. That’s it. It isn’t foreclosure, and it isn’t a short sale. Plenty of underwater homeowners just keep making the payment and stay put. Underwater only becomes a crisis when you have to sell or you can’t pay.

                            34. Where That Leaves You

                            35. If you’re current on your loan and staying put, none of this touches you this year. Equity is a number on paper until you sell.

                            36. If you bought in Florida between 2022 and 2025 with a small down payment, it’s worth knowing where you actually stand. Not the Zestimate. What a real agent says it will bring, minus the payoff, minus the cost of selling.

                            37. And if you’re already behind, or you can see behind from here, you have more options than most people realize. Reinstatement, forbearance, a loan modification, a regular sale, a short sale, and sometimes doing nothing for a while is the right call too. Which one fits depends on your numbers and your timeline. Nobody can tell you which one is right from a metro-level statistic, including me.

                            38. I’m in Jacksonville and I work Northeast Florida directly. If you’re somewhere else in the country, I’m not licensed to represent you, but I can point you to an agent in your market through the SFR network. Either way the questions are free.

                            39. My email is JimArmstrong904@gmail.com and my number is (904) 671-4161. Happy to answer whatever you’ve got.

                            40. Jim Armstrong, REALTOR - Momentum Realty - SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice. Cotality, ICE and Realtor.com figures are private-company estimates, not government data.

While Everyone Is Watching Tampa, the Numbers Actually Moved in Another Metro

Tampa is getting all the attention right now. It’s one of the most motivated seller markets in the country, and the coverage matches. But on the two measures that matter most if you’re a homeowner in trouble, Jacksonville looks worse than Tampa does.

I want to be careful about what that means, because it’s easy to read a number like this the wrong way.

What the Numbers Actually Measure

Parcl Labs publishes something called the Motivated Seller Index. It’s their own index, not a government dataset, and it tracks one thing: how sellers are behaving once they list. Are they cutting the price? Are they asking less than they paid for the house? That’s the whole idea. It does not measure whether anyone is behind on a mortgage.

Here’s the Jacksonville metro read as of this morning, July 27. There are 12,465 active listings. Forty-eight percent of them have cut the price at least once. Fifteen percent are asking less than the owner paid for the house. And 23% are owned by investors.

Tampa, same source, same morning: 27,497 listings, 51% cutting, 12% asking below purchase price, 18% investor-owned.

So Tampa cuts prices a little more often. But a bigger share of Jacksonville sellers are asking less than they paid, and a bigger slice of what’s for sale here belongs to investors.

Florida statewide sits at 45.2% cutting and 10.6% asking below purchase, across 214,602 active listings. The national index is lower than Florida’s. Jacksonville is running above the state average on both of the numbers I care about.

Why “Below Purchase Price” Is the One to Watch

Roughly one in seven Jacksonville listings is asking less than the owner paid.

Read that carefully. It does not mean one in seven Jacksonville homeowners is underwater. Most homeowners aren’t selling anything right now, and this only counts homes that are actively for sale. It’s a snapshot of sellers, not of owners.

But it’s still the closest early signal I know of for the conversation I have every week. That asking price is before you subtract the loan balance. Before closing costs. Before the commission. If somebody bought recently with a small down payment and they’re already asking less than they paid, the gap between what the house brings and what the bank is owed is bigger than that number looks. That’s me reasoning from how a closing statement works, not a published figure.

The Investor Number Is the Other Half

Nearly a quarter of the active listings in this metro are investor-owned.

Investors price to exit. They don’t have a kid’s height marked on the door frame. If the spreadsheet says take the loss and move on, they take the loss and move on, usually faster than a family can decide anything.

If you have to sell, that’s who you’re competing against on price. Worth knowing before you set your number.

Baker County Showed Up, and That’s a Flag

Baker County landed in Florida’s five most motivated counties this week, with the highest share of below-purchase listings of anything in that top five. Baker is one of NEFAR’s six counties, so that’s our backyard.

I’d hold that one loosely. Baker has about 124 active listings total. A county that small can swing on a couple of unusual houses. Treat it as a flag worth watching, not proof of anything.

Where I Was Partly Wrong Twelve Days Ago

On July 15, I wrote about NEFAR’s June numbers. Six-county median single-family price of $420,000, up from May and up close to 8% from a year earlier. My read was that rising prices in Northeast Florida meant a regular sale probably beats a short sale for most owners who’ve fallen behind.

I still think that’s right for a lot of people. But the seller behavior data says the ground is softer than that median price suggests, and I’d rather say so out loud than quietly let it slide.

These two sources measure different things and shouldn’t be mixed together. NEFAR measures what closed, and at what price. Parcl measures what sellers are currently asking compared to what they paid. A rising median and a rising motivated seller reading are the front and the back of the same market.

What to Do With This

If you’re current on your mortgage and you’re not selling, none of this changes your life today. File it away.

If you’re planning to list, price it against what’s actually happening, not against what your neighbor got three years ago. Almost half the market has already cut once.

And if you’re behind, or you can see behind from where you’re standing, the useful thing to know is that you have more than one option. Reinstatement, forbearance, a loan modification, a regular sale, a short sale. Which one fits depends entirely on your actual numbers: what you owe, what the house is worth today, and how much time you have. The worst version of this is waiting until the only option left is the one you didn’t want.

If you’ve got questions about any of it, my email is JimArmstrong904@gmail.com and my number is (904) 671-4161. No charge for a conversation.

Jim Armstrong, REALTOR, Momentum Realty. SFR (Short Sales and Foreclosure Resource) certified. This is general information, not legal, tax, or financial advice.

Florida’s Most Motivated Sellers Are All on the Gulf Coast

There’s a map that updates every morning showing which home sellers around the country are caving on price and which ones are still holding out. A housing data company called Parcl Labs publishes it, free, county by county. I pulled the Florida read this morning. The list is worth knowing whether you’re selling, thinking about it, or just trying to figure out what’s happening on your street.

One thing to get straight before the numbers. Parcl’s Motivated Seller Index is built out of asking behavior: how many listings have cut their price, how deep the cuts go, and how many are asking less than the owner paid. It’s their own index, not a government dataset. And it measures what sellers are doing to their asking price, not who’s behind on a mortgage. A motivated seller is not automatically a distressed seller. Keep those two things apart.

Where Florida Sits Right Now

Statewide the index reads 5.77, on a scale where 0 is holding firm and 10 is a fire sale. The country as a whole reads 5.25. Florida has 214,802 homes actively listed, roughly 13% of everything for sale in America.

Two numbers underneath that are the ones I’d pay attention to.

45.2% of Florida listings have already taken a price cut. Nationally it’s closer to 40%.

10.6% are asking less than the owner paid for the house. Nationally that’s about 6.5%. Call it one in nine listings here against one in fifteen everywhere else.

The Five Most Motivated Counties Are All on the Gulf

Pinellas leads the state at 7.15, with 51.3% of its listings cut and a median cut of 6.5%. Pasco is next at 7.04. Then Hillsborough at 6.82, Charlotte at 6.80, and Manatee at 6.74.

That’s the entire Tampa Bay ring, plus Manatee and Charlotte sitting just south of it. Half the listings in each of those counties have already dropped their price. In Pasco and Manatee, about one in six is asking less than the owner paid.

Tampa as a metro ranks 29th most motivated out of 927 metros in the country. 27,485 listings, 51.1% of them cut.

What “Asking Below Purchase” Really Costs Somebody

This is the line I’d sit with the longest, because it understates the problem.

Say somebody paid $400,000 in 2022, put 5% down, and is now asking $385,000. The index counts that as asking below purchase, which sounds like a $15,000 problem. It isn’t. The mortgage balance is still up near $370,000, and selling a house costs real money in commissions, taxes and fees. That’s how somebody who looks like they’re down fifteen thousand ends up needing to bring cash to closing.

That part is my reasoning about how the math works, not something the index reports. But it’s the reason that number matters more than it looks. It’s the point where a seller stops arguing about profit and starts figuring out how deep the hole is.

The County Nobody’s Talking About

Miami-Dade is the second least motivated county in the entire state, at 4.08. Only Okeechobee is lower.

It also has 19,528 active listings, more than any county in Florida. Only 35.1% have cut price. Only 5.7% are asking below purchase.

So you’ve got the biggest pile of unsold houses in the state, held by sellers who won’t budge. That’s not a healthy market. That’s a market that hasn’t given in yet. My read is that the cutting there comes later rather than never, though nobody can promise how that plays out.

Where Northeast Florida Lands

Duval, Clay, Nassau and St. Johns didn’t show up in the top five or the bottom five today. Our corner of the state is sitting mid pack on this measure.

That can look confusing, because ATTOM’s midyear report had Jacksonville as one of the ten worst foreclosure metros in the country among large markets. Both things are true. They’re measuring different stuff. ATTOM counts legal filings at the courthouse. Parcl counts what sellers are doing to their asking price. Don’t stack them on top of each other and call it one story.

If You’re the One Holding the House

Here’s the practical version.

If you’re on the Gulf coast and you’re behind, or getting close, the market around you is already discounting. Half your neighbors’ listings have cut. Waiting for the market to come get you out isn’t a plan right now.

The question that actually matters is a small one: what would your house realistically sell for this month, and what do you owe against it when you add the loan balance and the cost of selling. If the answer to the first is smaller than the answer to the second, that’s a short sale conversation. It needs your lender’s approval and it takes time to work through. Time is the part people run out of, usually because they waited to find out where they stood.

One more note on the map, since it refreshes daily. Everything above is this morning’s read. It’ll move.

If you want a straight answer about where you stand, reach out. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or (904) 671-4161. No pressure, no pitch.

A Rule Change Broke the Foreclosure Numbers. Here’s What’s Still True.

There’s an argument going on right now about whether the country is heading into a foreclosure crisis. One side says the numbers are exploding. The other side says it’s noise. Here’s the part almost nobody has mentioned: a big piece of what both sides are arguing about got scrambled by a paperwork rule that changed last October. If you’re a Florida homeowner who’s behind, or watching it get close, you deserve the version with the footnote in it.

What Changed Last October

Before October 1, 2025, if you were behind on an FHA loan and your servicer approved you for help, meaning a partial claim, a payment supplement, or a modification, your loan got marked current the month after you signed the paperwork. Done. Back to good on the report.

Since October 1, 2025, that’s not how it works. Now you have to finish a three-month trial payment plan first, three on-time payments in a row, before the loan gets marked current. And for those three months, your loan still gets reported as 90 or more days delinquent.

You didn’t get worse. The report did.

Kanav Bhagat, formerly the research director at the JPMorgan Chase Institute, put numbers on this in a paper published in March. FHA’s 90-plus delinquency rate went from 3.57% in September 2025 to 5.23% in January 2026. He found that 92% of that jump, 1.53 percentage points of it, was the reporting change and not people falling behind. Without the rule, the rate would have been about 3.70%.

The cure numbers show the same fingerprint. Through most of 2025, somewhere between 11% and 14.5% of seriously delinquent FHA loans went back to current each month. The month the trial payment requirement took effect, that dropped to about 3.1%. People didn’t stop getting caught up. Their catching up got parked in a three-month holding tank.

Both Sides Are Reading the Same Broken Gauge

Last winter, the doom crowd pointed at exploding FHA delinquencies as proof a crisis had landed. Most of that spike was plumbing.

Now the tank is draining. Those trial plans are finishing, loans are getting marked current, and the reports are improving. ICE published its June mortgage numbers on July 24 showing new FHA defaults down 15% year over year, the biggest annual drop in more than four years, and serious delinquencies at a six-month low. That improvement is real on paper. But part of it is the same rule running the other direction.

I want to be careful here, because this is where people overreach. Bhagat’s work runs through February. Nobody has published a version of the June numbers adjusted for the rule. So the honest statement is that part of the improvement is mechanical, not all of it. The rule is also FHA-only, so it doesn’t move the whole national delinquency figure by itself.

The same day the June numbers came out, Logan Mohtashami at HousingWire published a piece called “Don’t fall for a fake foreclosure crisis,” going after the doom content built on ATTOM’s 21% jump in foreclosure filings. His case rests on inventory, equity and loan quality, and the FHA rule doesn’t touch any of those. In 2007 there were about 4 million homes for sale nationally. Today there are 1.56 million, against a normal range of 2 to 2.5 million. New listings last week came in at 74,250, compared to 379,711 in 2010. Back in 2010 more than 23% of homeowners owed more than the house was worth. Today about 40% of American homes carry no mortgage at all, and loan-to-value across the market sits at 45.1% versus roughly 85% in 2008. Most people hold a 30-year fixed rate, so there’s no payment reset waiting to hit.

He’s right, and the rule change helps his argument more than he claimed. But it costs him something too. He doesn’t get to lean on this year’s improvement either, because that’s the same broken gauge running backward.

The Numbers the Rule Change Didn’t Touch

Here’s the useful part. Foreclosure starts, foreclosure inventory and completed foreclosure sales run through a court process, not a servicer’s classification code. The October rule doesn’t reach them. So look there.

Total loans 30 or more days late or in foreclosure rose 40,000 in a single month, to 2,253,000. Every bucket is up year over year. Loans 30 days or more behind are up 127,000. The 90-plus group is up 104,000. Homes actively in foreclosure are up 84,000, a 39.3% increase. Active foreclosure inventory sits at 0.53%, a six-year high. Foreclosure starts came in at 43,000, up 39.7% from a year ago, also a six-year high. Completed foreclosure sales were 7,300, up 15.5% year over year but still 46% below where they ran before the pandemic.

One more thing worth sitting with. A borrower in a trial payment plan is in an active workout, and servicers generally don’t push a foreclosure forward while one is running. That’s how the process works, so the rule ought to be holding starts down. Starts hit a six-year high anyway. That’s my read on the mechanics rather than a published finding, but it’s worth thinking about.

Florida Stopped Getting New Buyers

Under all of that sits a Florida number that got almost no coverage.

The University of Florida’s Shimberg Center published new Census-based migration estimates on July 13. Florida added 201,191 residents through migration in 2025, about 551 people a day. At the 2022 peak it was 598,737, or roughly 1,640 a day. Births minus deaths came out close to flat, so migration is basically all of Florida’s growth.

The domestic piece fell harder. Net domestic migration ran around 310,000 across 2022 and 2023. Then about 184,000. Then roughly 58,000 in 2024. Then about 22,500 last year. That’s a drop near 93% from the peak.

Where the remaining movers are going matters too. Miami-Dade lost more domestic residents than any county in the state in 2025, with nearly 73,000 more people leaving for other counties and states than arriving. Broward lost domestic residents. So did Orange, Hillsborough and Pinellas. Polk, Pasco and Marion kept gaining. Anne Ray at the Shimberg Center put it this way: “As housing costs have risen, many movers appear to be looking beyond the state’s largest urban counties to communities where homes are more affordable and new construction has kept pace with demand.”

Here’s why that matters if you’re in trouble. Almost every distress conversation focuses on the seller’s costs, meaning insurance, taxes, assessments, the payment. This is the other half. For twenty years Florida distress got bailed out by the next wave of people moving in. There was usually somebody arriving who wanted to buy the house. That wave is down to a trickle. Fewer buyers showing up means a house sits longer, the price gets cut deeper, and there’s a better chance the seller lands under what’s owed.

What This Actually Means for You

The doom crowd used an artificial spike as proof of a crisis. The all-clear crowd is about to use an artificial drop as proof it’s over. Same rule change, opposite conclusions.

What’s actually true is narrower and more useful than either one. This is not 2008 and it’s not close. It’s also not nothing. Pressure is building slowly off a very low base, Florida is carrying more of it than most states, and none of that argument reaches the person who can’t make the payment this month.

If that’s you, the national debate is background noise. Your numbers are the ones that matter: what you owe, what the house would really sell for today, and how many months of options you have left. That last one gets smaller the longer you wait.

If you’ve got questions about where you stand, reach out. JimArmstrong904@gmail.com or (904) 671-4161. No pressure, no pitch, just a straight answer.