Field services

Sledgehammered by the foreclosure crisis, drug dealing and other crimes, some Dayton, Ohio, neighborhoods are too far gone even for the Montgomery County Land Bank to use its limited resources for demolitions.

Vanessa Krnjaich may not have thought she was saving a neighborhood when she bought her fixer-upper for $45,555 at auction in August 2013.

Mortgage Contracting Services will acquire Carrington Home Solutions' property preservation division in a deal expected to close by the end of the year.

As is the case with most communities across Western New York, Lockport has its share of "zombie" properties.

There's a handful of zombies out there threatening to wreck your neighborhood or at least create a frightful landscaping nightmare next door.

Rick Felix paid $200,000 for a four-bedroom, split-level foreclosed house in Ambler. He made the payment in cash without any option to inspect or even get a good look inside the place beforehand.

If Fannie Mae's clear-boarding requirements prove effective, New York may follow Ohio's lead and move forward with a bill requiring it to be used more broadly on zombie properties.

Fires can make or break Staten Island, N.Y., zombie homes.

Hundreds of homes and properties are neglected, abandoned or vacant across Staten Island, N.Y.

The blighted property review committee wants to take a multipronged approach to addressing neglected properties in Hazelton, Pa.

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan has signed a bill that will expedite foreclosures of vacant and abandoned properties this fall.

The days of vacant, distressed homes covered in sheets of plywood appear numbered, as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac move toward greater adoption of polycarbonate "clear boarding" to secure foreclosure properties.

Kentucky has a property problem and Henderson is no exception. Some property owners let their grass grow past 10 inches. Unsafe structures are not secured or boarded up. The list or problems goes on.

Years after the worst of the housing crisis, states still dealing with high foreclosure activity are weighing laws to speed the process on vacant or abandoned properties.

Robeson County, N.C., is losing needed revenue by not taking foreclosure action sooner against property owners who have not paid taxes, according to Commissioner David Edge.

On the eve of delivering money to help flood victims rebuild their homes, the federal agency is demanding Louisiana repay $6.6 million because of sloppy handling of funds for building low- and moderate-income housing over the past decade.

Ohio has prohibited the use of plywood to board up certain vacant or abandoned properties in foreclosure.

The National Fair Housing Alliance and 20 local fair housing groups have filed a lawsuit in federal court against Fannie Mae over its maintenance and marketing of foreclosure properties.

Two consumer advocacy groups in California have accused CIT Group's OneWest Bank of failing to provide mortgages and other financial services in minority neighborhoods.

Condominium associations cannot afford to take on the potential legal risk that reporting delinquent borrowers to the credit bureaus would bring.