TALLAHASSEE - Florida families facing foreclosure run into a frustrating maze when they try to work out emergency arrangements with their lenders, Chief Financial Officer Alex Sink said Wednesday.
Backed by lawyers from Florida Legal Services Inc., she announced plans for an April 20 meeting in Tampa to bring banking executives together with lawyers who give free legal advice to the poor.
Since the economy crashed last year, with housing always ranking as the state’s chief economic challenge, Sink said tens of thousands of families have faced foreclosure. She said many of them heed the advice of the banking and mortgage industry, to contact their lenders at the earliest sign of trouble, but that homeowners often get no answers - or can’t even find out whom they need to contact.
“We’ve been hearing a sense of frustration from our lawyer partners,” Sink said. “They were getting wrapped up in the runaround.”
There were more than 46,000 Florida foreclosure filings in Florida, ranking the state second in the nation.
She said the Florida Bar and Legal Services have created a volunteer program, involving about 1,000 attorneys, to help people facing foreclosure who can’t afford to hire a lawyer. Jennifer Newton, an attorney in the “Florida Lawyers Saving Homes” program, said about 25,000 calls have been received since last June.
Newton said to qualify a property must be a homestead and the owner must be unable to hire private counsel - and must not have already been served with a foreclosure order.
Sink said she will convene the Tampa meeting with “a dozen or so of the largest lenders” in the state, to work out a method for volunteer lawyers to cut through the bureaucracy and get answers for homeowners.