The Bank of America tower, an iconic 55-story Atlanta office building advertised for foreclosure, was not the only business in trouble to start 2012 says Equity Depot's CEO Barry Bramlett.
There were 18 sizeable apartment complexes in metro Atlanta being jointly advertised on a $335 million loan in the last five weeks.
"The economic affect of the recession is obvious with the number of large commercial properties facing foreclosure," Bramlett said. "Delinquencies aren’t exclusive to home mortgages but are having a damaging affect on commercial and multi-family as well."
Standing on the sidelines are companies waiting for bargains to float to the surface, just as in the housing market, which has seen investment buyers from Australia to Israel snapping up homes.
Well-capitalized Atlanta companies such as Cortland Partners, which has acquired 17 apartment communities in the Southeast in 2011, and Mesa Capital Partners, headed by former Cousins CEO Tom Bell and former Georgia Pacific CEO Pete Correll, are also in the run for under-performing apartment complexes.
Foreclosure numbers are largely up county-to-county, Equity Depot's numbers say, but that is to be expected because the January count has an extra week because of the way the calendar falls.
"The numbers remain very consistent, [with the] the normal 25% [upward] bump we see given the extra calendar week between auctions," Bramlett said.
There were 9,406 advertised foreclosures in the 13 county area, an increase of some 2,000 over December’s 7,454. More than 65 percent of the foreclosures have run in a prior period. An advertisement does not necessarily end in foreclosure, as lenders may continue working with borrowers to find ways to heal their bad loans.
The Christmas moratorium on foreclosures – some major lenders suspended foreclosures because no one wants to been seen in the role of Scrooge during the holidays – seems to have had little effect on the numbers.
The signs of life in the economy, with unemployment ticking down below 10 percent in Georgia, growing state tax collections, and some positive retail sales reports, have not yet filtered into the housing market.
Some housing economists, such as the National Association of Realtors' Lawrence Yun, are predicting a more stable housing market with some slight rises by the end of the year.
But economists have been predicting housing would see an upturn in two years for the last five years
Foreclosure counts
County January December 2,011
Cherokee 403 277
Cobb 1,059 847
DeKalb 1,483 1,199
Fayette 155 133
Forsyth 257 173
Fulton 1,754 1,335
Gwinnett 1,826 1,556
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