If the property next has been vacant forever and waiting for the lender to foreclose.  Governor John Kasich signed the bill last week  (H.B. 390) aimed at speeding up the foreclosure process in Ohio.  Now we must wait 90 days until the bill becomes law.

“Ohio has now put itself ahead of the national curve in fighting community blight,” Robert Klein, founder and chairman of Community Blight Solutions, told HousingWire. Klein says his Cleveland-based organization has worked for three years to get a fast-track process in place for foreclosures. “Outdated foreclosure laws are one of the primary causes of blight in communities across the country, and Ohio is one of only a few states that are doing anything about it.”

Under current Ohio law, homes can sit abandoned for at least two years and become zombie homes, Klein says. When the new law takes effect in 90 days, it will speed up the foreclosure process to as little as six months. “No one will be forced out of their home by this law,” Klein says. “There are clear protections to ensure that a property is, indeed, vacant and abandoned.”

So if the you have suffered through living around a vacant property with weeds and growing everywhere, vandals attempting to steal the contents and the blight affecting your property values- relief may be on the way.  And finally, after years of problems with lenders taking care of blighted properties, the U.S. Senate may finally consider new rules governing the maintenance of abandoned/foreclosed homes.

Currently in the greater Cincinnati real estate market the only recourse is for neighbors to complain to local authorities about blight issues and based on local zoning rules, the local government can step in and cut grass.

Not much relief when you have a property next door to you with busted windows and gutters overflowing with junk.

The delay in getting the foreclosure messed resolve in Ohio ( and other similar states) can be partly blamed on the fact that Ohio is a judicial state– all foreclosures must be processed through the court system.  And, not surprisingly, about 2/3 of the 20 states with foreclosure inventory rates about the national average were judicial states.  According to numbers published by CoreLogic at the end of April, 2016 1.3% of the Ohio inventory are foreclosures.  The change is -16.4% from 12 months earlier and the number of 23,017 foreclosures were completed from April 2015-April 2016.  And 3.5% of borrowers are considered to be seriously delinquent which means more foreclosures are on the horizon.