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It’s not just the lower classes that continue to get hit hard by foreclosures in South Florida. The Miami-Fort Lauderdale metro area leads the nation in foreclosures on properties worth more than $5 million, according to real estate website RealtyTrac. In fact, about a fourth of all high-end foreclosures in the last year have been on properties in the area.
Of course, those foreclosures are rare. In the entire country there were a little less than 200 such foreclosures in the past year. Total foreclosures reached about 1.2 million.
Forty-seven of those were in the Miami area. In fact, Florida and California make up about 60 percent of all foreclosures.
However, high-end foreclosures are on the rise. In Miami, they’re up 488 percent over the previous year.
“This trend may indicate lenders are now financially stable enough to more comfortably weather the big-ticket losses that these properties potentially represent,” writes RealtyTrac. “In addition, an improving housing market means more prospective buyers, even for these ultra high-end properties — which includes both homes and commercial properties.”
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