From the South Florida Web site: Thousands of South Floridians are among the nation’s foreclosure victims who’ve learned the hard way that troubles spawned by that procedure don’t end when they lose their home. John King, a Coral Gables resident who defaulted on his mortgage and was foreclosed upon, found out last month that a Miami-Dade County court gave debt collectors permission to seek an additional $44,000 stemming from the litigation. Lenders, reeling from the collapse of boom real estate markets like South Florida, Las Vegas and California, are now pursuing their right to seek the unpaid mortgage balances of homeowners who have defaulted. Ben Hillard, a former investment banker who now is a real estate and corporate attorney at Hillard & Rogers in Largo, said banks are now able to pursue what are called deficiency judgments with greater frequency as they adjust to the realities of a market cratering.

Alex Rodriguez (left) chopped the price on his Coral Gables mansion (right).

New York Yankees slugger Alexander Rodriguez is opting for a major buzz cut on his ritzy ranch in Coral Gables. A-Rod listed the waterfront estate for $14.9 million last October and just dropped the price to $9.9 million, a local broker said. And if he can’t find a buyer, he’ll take a renter willing to pony up $25,000 a month. In yet another sign of sunny Miami’s downwardly spiraling real estate
fortunes, Rodriguez is hawking the Biscayne Bay mansion for less than
the $12 million he and his estranged wife, Cynthia, paid in 2004. Comments

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