Bank foreclosure listings from UBS, CIM and BofA now include apartment units seized or foreclosed in San Francisco.

Recently, 30 apartment buildings operated by the Lembi family have been sold by UBS, Bank of America and other lenders as foreclosure properties or have been given back to the lenders voluntarily in lieu of foreclosure.

About 20 buildings are now being sold by UBS after getting these properties back from the Lembi family in lieu of foreclosure. UBS, which took back 51 apartment buildings from the Lembis, said it is holding onto the rest of the Lembi apartment portfolio to get better prices.

Another lender, CIM Group, also took back 24 apartment buildings from the Lembi family in lieu of foreclosure and said that it is holding onto the buildings for now.

Among the apartment properties that were already sold by the banks are the seven buildings purchased by Russell Flynn, which owns and operates around 3,000 rental buildings in San Francisco. Flynn said the Lembi apartment buildings are great investment opportunities and he plans to buy more.

Flynn also added that bank forelosure listings in the past six years did not have multifamily properties that he could afford to buy and that the Lembi properties are types of properties that are good buildings and at the same time affordable to investors like him.

Stephen Pugh, managing director of Alain Pinel Investment which sold ten of the Lembi apartment buildings, said the sharp decrease in rents and the lack of new financing for apartment buildings largely caused the difficulties of the Lembis and other apartment owners.

Pugh added that most of the buyers of the Lembi properties are based in San Francisco and are already in the rental business. They just wanted to add more units to their rental portfolios.

All the apartment buildings were sold at substantial discounts – up to 40 percent lower than what the Lembis paid for the properties during the boom. But still, Stanford Skeie, a top executive of Marcus & Millichap which represented one buyer of some of the Lembi properties, said he wondered why the sales prices were not lower.

Nonetheless, Jeffrey Mishkin, managing director of Marcus & Millichap, said that the enthusiasm of the buyers of the apartment buildings indicates that the real estate market is beginning to recover and that financing is becoming available again for properties in bank foreclosure listings.

The 2008 Consumer Complaint Survey Report showed that the top three complaints in 2008 remained unchanged since 2007. Home improvements and construction, automobile care and collection of credit and debt still receive the highest number of complaints from consumers last year and the year before.

According to the report, a growing number of complaints were filed against fraudulent foreclosure prevention services in 2008. The rise in the number of foreclosed property across the country has left many homeowners desperate to save their properties from foreclosure, making them vulnerable to unscrupulous people.

Los Angeles County Department of Consumer Affairs director Pastor Herrera Jr. said that fraudulent foreclosure prevention services were so bad and rampant that the category could top the list of consumer complaints this year. He said that desperate homeowners would do anything to save their properties from foreclosure listings.

Consumer Federation of America’s consumer protection director Susan Grant agrees with Herrera, adding that the worst thing that could happen to anybody is to lose their properties to foreclosures and to have someone pretend that they are trying to help save distressed properties.

The report surveyed 34 agencies which logged over 265,000 consumer complaints. According to the report, many consumer protection agencies reduced the number of their staff amid the worsening recession which spawned an increase in fraudulent foreclosure prevention schemes and debt collection. The cut in the workforce meant a reduction in the number of consumers that could be helped by these agencies.

Issues related to landlords and tenants rose to the eighth spot in 2008 from the 10th position in 2007. Meanwhile, complaints on health-related products and services replaced landlord and tenant issues in the 10th spot.

Some agencies reported a substantial increase in the number of consumer complaints they received last year. The Governor’s Office of Consumer Affairs in Georgia said that consumer complaints filed on its office last year rose by almost 50 percent.

Additionally, consumer complaints in Orange County, Florida increased by 45 percent. Florida is one of the top 10 states in the country with a high number of foreclosed homes.

The report stated that consumer agencies, both state and local, were swamped with credit/debt collection-related complaints. Some of these complaints involved billing disputes, fee disputes, predatory lending, fraudulent foreclosure prevention schemes, mortgage fraud, debt settlement, abusive or illegal collection tactics and credit repair.

The abundance of properties on repo homes listings has forced some lenders to delay foreclosure on delinquent houses. Some lenders are still filing for repossession, but industry experts said that some are avoiding foreclosing on delinquent properties.

This is because property values continue to decline and lenders have learned that placing properties on repo homes listings and reselling them do not help in recovering their losses.

In fact, foreclosing on delinquent properties can be costly to lenders because they will be responsible for paying the insurance, taxes and code enforcement fines.

Jacksonville Area Legal Aid agency lawyer April Charney said that some lenders are canceling foreclosure auctions or dismissing cases after they have realized that a home is worth way below its market value.

She said that some of these cases her agency have litigated for years, adding that she is getting an average of two case dismissals per week.

Real estate experts pointed out that properties on repo homes listings have become so cheap that some lenders know that flooding the market with more foreclosed homes would only pull down prices further.

Charney said that if a foreclosed house does not sell at an auction, it will become another empty property in the community where it will pull down prices of surrounding houses in the neighborhood and become magnet to thieves and vagrants.

Attorney Ralph Fisher observes that lenders are now ignoring troubled homeowners, refusing to make contact with them. This leaves family in limbo about what will happen to them and their properties.

Industry experts believe that the reluctance of lenders to foreclose on delinquent properties does not improve the predicament of distressed homeowners. When the title of a delinquent property is on the precipice of foreclosure, the homeowner could not refinance or sell.

Meanwhile, Lisa Pride of the Hillsborough County Circuit Court foreclosure division in Florida said that so far, there are 3,874 repossession auctions scheduled this year, but only 2,021 have pushed through. The rest either the plaintiff’s lawyer failed to show up or the auction was cancelled.

Lawyer Timothy Kingcade said that another reason for delayed foreclosure is the lack of resources to file all the cases in court in a timely manner.

And data showed that more and more lenders are avoiding placing properties located in lower-income areas on repo homes listings because of the drastic drop in housing prices.

Low foreclosure listing prices have cut real estate values in Tampa Bay, Florida, especially in the counties of Hillsborough and Pasco.

A total of 185,156 home loans got modified in the first quarter this year under the Obama administration’s foreclosed home prevention program, according to a report released by the Office of Thrift Supervision and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

Foreclosed home list prices and non-foreclosure prices declined in Atlanta in April, based on the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller report released this week.

There are two bits of good news related to foreclosed home listings in California’s Merced county and city. One is the compliance of banks with Merced City’s ordinance on the maintenance of properties in foreclosed home listings. Another is the increasing home affordability across Merced County.

Data released by the National Association of Realtors showed that of sales repossession homes in April dropped to a significant level despite increase interest of investors and first time homebuyers on foreclosure properties listings.

The U.S. Housing and Urban Development’s Mortgagee Review Board, which was launched in 1989 to monitor and sanction mortgage lenders who break the policies of the Federal Housing Administration, has been criticized by the HUD’s inspector general for its failure to monitor mortgage lenders in the midst of the exploding number of repo list properties.

James Harris is just one among an estimated 5,000 South Carolina homeowners who would be able to save their houses from becoming foreclosure homes.