Land banks play a vital role in communities with abandoned properties hoping to be available again for purchase. The title insurance industry is a main player when it comes to these efforts. The 2018 National Settlement Services Summit (NS3) welcomes three expert panelists to the stage to help attendees learn how they can engage in similar initiatives in their communities. Alex DeCamp, vice president, mortgage community development manager, Chemical Bank, Michael Donovan, principal attorney, Detroit Land Bank Authority, and Jeff McEvoy, owner chief managing member, Home Surety Title and Escrow, LLC, are ready to cover all the bases in Detroit.
McEvoy, a 20-year veteran of real estate law, will, among other things, address the conference attendees on what is referred to as blighted properties. Those properties are land so damaged and neglected they are incapable of being a benefit to the community without outside intervention.
“The blight issue is such a large issue and a big issue in the sense you’ve heard the saying it takes a village to raise a child, well, it will take more than a village to raise this child as far as blighted properties,” McEvoy said. “There are so many parts to the process. You have to have community organizations (non-profits) to help, banks getting involved with CRA issues as a reinvestment, cities getting involved, tax properties, initiatives with courts, you have to have builders and there are the title issues. These are all major parts and then have some of those nonprofits potentially willing to give large funds to help these areas grow.”
McEvoy will provide more in-depth analysis of blighted properties in his hometown of Memphis where a statute was just passed allowing these blighted properties to go into receiverships. With that, third parties can now be receivers so as to cleanup these properties. This statute, which is so important because just one of these blighted properties can affect the whole block of the neighborhood, is awaiting the Governor’s signature.
“I’ve spoken to some folks at several lenders, and they want to get these things (property issues) resolved,” McEvoy said. “They don’t want the properties but have to find people and communicate what needs to be done. There are so many absentee owners just buying these properties and they do nothing – that’s just ridiculous. They are purchased to establish a corporation to own this as a tax sale property. These owners don’t pay taxes or make any improvements. They are looking for someone to come back and flip the property. They gamble on that and don’t go ahead and make the improvements. That has to change.”
McEvoy plans to enlighten the NS3 audience on some legislation in Tennessee which is looking to bring that change and get these properties improved and back into proper hands. There will be more than enough visuals in his presentation to make his point.
“There is so much history involved with these properties and neighborhoods, they should be preserved,” he said. “In Memphis, there are city-wide, according to a survey, 40,000 of the 200,000 properties labeled as blighted with an estimated 2,500 residential and multi-family properties suffering with bad conditions. There are 95 single-family houses vacant and abandoned with more than 2,500 vacant lots visible.
“And what are the repercussions of that? Millions lost in property tax revenues, a decline in surrounding areas, homes becoming a significant cost to the city by way of monitoring and keeping up emergency features, and the inviting of criminal activities presenting a danger to the community and neighborhood,” McEvoy added.
NS3 is an event McEvoy wouldn’t miss for the world.
“Everybody’s there,” he said. “That’s the bottom line because you have your investors, banks and other professional peers. Where business people hope to get things done and who you want to get your message across to and who you can learn from in return, those opportunities present themselves to attendees because all those people and institutions are represented at NS3.”
For more information on the 2018 NS3, including the agenda and a list of speakers, click here. You can register for NS3 online or click here to get information on how to register via mail, fax or phone.