Lightning strikes are fairly common across the country.  Thunderstorms present major safety hazards and can damage property.  The cloud-to-ground lightning strikes at the center of these thunderstorms can be very dangerous whether you are indoors or out.  But there are several things you can do to avoid lighting strikes, to yourself and your home.

Don’t pick up the phone during a thunderstorm.  Avoid using the telephone, especially the corded variety, unless it’s an absolute emergency.  Cell phones are OK to use in a thunderstorm.

Avoid using electricity and plumbing inside your home.  Your home’s electrical and plumbing systems can be conductive dangers when lightning strikes, so stop any related activities if you know that a thunderstorm is on its way.

All electrical equipment such as televisions, computers and appliances should be shut down and unplugged, as should your air conditioner, which can end up with a damaged compressor if there’s a lightning-induced power surge. Also, avoid tasks that involve contact with pipes or running water. That means no use of sinks or showers, and no laundry chores. Finally, stay away from windows and doors, and don’t lie on concrete floors or lean against concrete walls.

Keep pets indoors during a thunderstorm.  Outdoor doghouses aren’t usually lightning-safe shelters, so be sure to bring all pets indoors before a storm.

Don’t go outside during a thunderstorm.  You may be tempted to get a closer look at a storms spectacle, but don’t. Stay off of your porch or deck and stick to safety zones indoors. If you’re already outdoors when a storm looms, quickly get to the shelter of a large, fully enclosed building (partially enclosed structures such as sheds, pavilions and carports are not safe options) or an enclosed metal vehicle.

If neither of these is immediately possible, make sure you’re far away from any isolated trees or other tall objects, metal items such as poles and fences, and any recreational equipment that contains metal, like your bike or backpack. Instead of lying flat on the ground when trapped in an open area outdoors, get into a crouch by putting your feet together, squatting low, tucking your head and covering your ears.

Don’t stay on the road during a thunderstorm.  It’s best not to be on the road at all during a thunder and lightning storm if you can help it, but if you’re caught in one, safety depends on care and common sense. Pull off to the shoulder of the road in a spot that’s well away from trees or anything else that could fall on your car. Turn on your emergency flashers and remain in the car until the storm passes, avoiding all metal surfaces inside the vehicle in the meantime.   

These safety tips can help you avoid dangerous lightning strikes and help keep your home and family safe.                                                                                               

Three homes were hit by lightening in the Orlando area yesterday and a possible fourth fire today could be the result of a lightening strike. Being aware of the dangers that our afternoon thunderstorms can bring can help keep your home and family safe.

Buy Owner service is in liquidation

BOCA RATON, Fla. – Aug. 20, 2010 – The Buy Owner broker-free real estate firm, known for its familiar “Thanks, Buy Owner” advertisements, has filed for liquidation as the housing market continues to struggle.

The Deerfield Beach-based company will continue to operate with a reduced staff as a buyer is sought for its assets, which could include the purchase of the firm in its entirety, minus its debt.

“The phones, as far as people interested in the service, remain very active, and we are signing up new clients everyday,” said Philip J. von Kahle, managing director for Michael Moecker & Associates, which is the assignee for Buy Owner. “There is still a very valuable core business here.”

Buy Owner president and CEO Scott A. Eckert lives in Boca Raton.

The company filed last month for an assignment for the benefit of creditors in Broward County, which is similar to a Chapter 7 federal bankruptcy but in state court. As assignee, the Fort Lauderdale-based Michael Moecker & Associates, is responsible for maximizing the assets of the company so creditors can get paid.

Von Kahle said the combination of a down real estate market and a large Bank of America loan that recently required payment led to the liquidation filing. According to court documents, Buy Owner owes about $3.9 million to Bank of America, and $1.2 million in back pay to its executives, including Eckert. It has 33 shareholders.

Buy Owner, founded in 1984, charges fees to sellers based on how much exposure they want on its website, and what features, such as custom fliers or talking yard signs, they choose. It is free to buyers.

The company has franchises in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Jacksonville, New Orleans, Orlando, Philadelphia and Tampa.

“I don’t think the company could scale down quick enough because it got so big,” said von Kahle. “It appears to me the loan from Bank of America was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

A 2009 Florida Realtors report found about 10 percent of homes sold last year did so without the help of a Realtor.

Leyza Blanco, an attorney with Miami-based GrayRobinson, P.A. who is representing Michael Moecker & Associates, said she has filed a motion to allow for liquidation of the business as a whole, rather than its parts. Because Buy Owner is a service-based company, that could maximize profits, Blanco said.

“There’s not a lot of tangible assets that you can just take apart and sell,” she said.

Creditors have until Nov. 23 to file claims against the company.

Copyright © 2010 The Palm Beach Post, Fla. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Foreclosed homes permeate the American landscape. According to data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), they make up about one in 12 houses with under $1 million left on the mortgage.

These foreclosures drive down home prices, and MIT gives two reasons for their depreciating effect – because foreclosed homes add to the housing supply and because the financial firms that acquire the houses want to unload them promptly.

However, since foreclosures often occur in economically struggling areas, it is hard to determine how much of the drop in a home’s value is due to its foreclosure, and how much can be blamed on the economy in general.

MIT economist Parag Pathak and two Harvard researchers, John Y. Campbell and Stefano Giglio, have www.mit.edu/files/3914” target=”_blank”>conducted a study to put a price tag on foreclosures.

Specifically, they’ve determined how much a foreclosure affects a home’s value, as opposed to a home going on the market because the owner has died or declared bankruptcy.

The three academia colleagues examined 1.8 million home sales in Massachusetts from 1987 to 2009. By looking in granular detail at real estate prices, they concluded that a

foreclosure reduces the value of a house by 27 percent, on average.

“It’s not surprising that there is a discount due to foreclosure,” said Pathak. “But it is surprising that it’s so large.”

By contrast, other types of forced sales lower home prices by smaller amounts. When a house is sold after the death of an owner, the researchers found the price drops 5 to 7 percent on average. When an owner declares bankruptcy, the value sinks 3 percent.

The researchers believe that their discovery of the gaps between these various price reductions is a key to isolating the effects of foreclosures. They suggest that a central cause of the larger foreclosure discount is that the condition of foreclosed houses often deteriorates much more than it does for other kinds of houses whose ownership changes hands.

This tendency of foreclosed homes to fall into disrepair lies behind the other main finding of Pathak and his colleagues – the presence of a foreclosed house in a neighborhood reduces the value of the homes around it.

In their estimation, the value of a home drops by 1 percent, on average, if it is within roughly 250 feet of a foreclosed home, namely because the vacant home may not be properly maintained and because foreclosures are typically resold quickly for a discount, their sale price can affect valuation comparables.

The study is a “very valuable and important paper,” according to Christopher Mayer PhD, a professor and dean at Columbia Business School in New York, who thinks it will open up more research on whether foreclosures cause other foreclosures, a process he calls “contagion.”

Even though Pathak, Campbell, and Giglio found that foreclosures only dent the values of neighboring homes, Mayer questions whether there may be a tipping point “at which a neighborhood starts to fall apart.”

More evidence as to why a foreclosure should be avoided, it’s more profitable to try and sell the property to a homebuyer without the house becoming the property of the bank. Selling the home via short sale is a viable solution for homeowners and lenders.

Seminole County Public Schools’ four-year high schools placed in the top 3 percent of the nation, according to a new Newsweek magazine ranking.

The county’s nine high schools have ranked, at a minimum, in the top 5 percent every year since the index was established in 2004.

The “America’s Best High Schools” list included the following Seminole County high schools: Seminole, Lyman, Hagerty, Winter Springs, Lake Mary, Oviedo, Lake Brantley, Lake Howell and Crooms. This is the first year for Hagerty to qualify with its first class of graduating seniors in 2009.

Newsweek ranked the nation’s more than 27,000 public high schools according to the Challenge Index developed by Jay Mathews. The index creates a ratio of the number of advanced placement (AP) and/or international baccalaureate (IB) tests taken by all students at a public high school in May 2009 divided by the number of graduating seniors for that same school year.

All schools on the top list of 1,600 schools have an index of at least 1.000, indicating that at least as many tests were given as there were graduates for that school. By this calculation, these schools are in the top 6 percent of public high schools nationwide, Newsweek said.

MIAMI – Aug. 11, 2010 – Three South Florida law firms that represent mortgage lenders are being investigated by the state attorney general over allegations they forged documents filed with the courts in foreclosure cases.

The Florida attorney general issued the subpoenas this week, requesting reams of paperwork by the end of the month from attorneys working in the one of the top foreclosure areas of the country.

The investigation targets firms considered to be handling the largest number of foreclosures in Florida on behalf of lenders, in some cases handling thousands of cases a month. They are the Law Offices of David J. Stern in Plantation; the Law Offices of Marshall C. Watson in Fort Lauderdale; and Shapiro & Fishman, which has offices in Boca Raton and Tampa.

The subpoenas request documents going back to at least Jan. 1, 2008.

Attorney General Bill McCollum said the firms may have presented fabricated documents in court to obtain foreclosure judgments against homeowners. Thousands of final judgments of foreclosure against Florida homeowners may have been the result of improper actions by the firms under investigation, said McCollum, a Republican who is a running for governor.

He likened their work processing so many foreclosures to a mill, churning out foreclosures in large volumes.

“Law firms are not immune to Florida deceptive and unfair trade practice” laws, McCollum said during a press conference. “I want law firms to really think about it before they go through this volume.”

The attorney general’s office was alerted to possible problems by attorneys for homeowners, said Mary Leontakianakos, director of the economic crimes division.

“I can tell you having seen some of this paperwork there is clearly some concern,” she said.

Leontakianakos said that in the best-case scenario, the mistakes could be sloppiness; in the worst, fraud.

Jeffrey Tew, a Miami attorney who represents Stern’s firm, said foreclosure proceedings are well supervised, leaving little room for paperwork mistakes.

“Every foreclosure file is personally supervised by a circuit judge who is there to do one thing: Make sure the rights of the borrower or lender are protected,” Tew said. He added that there have been occasional errors, but that is to be expected at a firm that employs 1,200 people and worked on as many as 75,000 foreclosure cases in the last year.

“We’re convinced that David’s law firm has been acting appropriately,” Tew said. “We don’t have any concern about the outcome.”

Stern was sued in federal court in late July by a homeowner. The lawsuit accuses Stern of generating fraudulent mortgage assignments in foreclosure cases, and Oakland Park resident Ignacio Damian Figueroa is seeking class-action status for the case.

Watson’s firm declined to comment.

West Palm Beach attorney Gerald Richman, who represents Shapiro & Fishman, said there are no grounds to investigate the firm. The firm will cooperate with the investigation, he said.

“We don’t have any information that there’s anything been done by Shapiro & Fishman that’s been improper or would require investigation,” Richman said.

Copyright © 2010 The Miami Herald, Nirvi Shah. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Related Topics: Foreclosures