Jamaican Foreclosures Jumped 2,550% in One Year. Nobody Saw It Coming

• Foreclosures rose from 8 in 2010 to 212 in 2011
• Non-performing loans grew 46.3% in the same period
• The NLA declined to break out further detail
• NHT’s own policy still doesn’t include foreclosure

The National Land Agency confirmed 212 foreclosures in 2011, up from just eight in 2010, a 2,550 percent increase that coincided with rising loan defaults and falling auction sales across Jamaica’s mortgage market. Central bank data for the same period showed non-performing loans among regulated banks, near-banks and building societies had grown 46.3 percent in the year ending September 2011, reaching just under J$28.9 billion.

Foreclosures had been genuinely rare in Jamaica before this spike, according to the NLA, where foreclosure applications are filed and approved through the registrar of lands: two in 2009, none at all in 2008. One mortgage executive, speaking on condition of anonymity, cautioned against reading too much into the headline percentage increase. We really only started to get serious about foreclosures in 2011 but the numbers are not as high as some people think, he said, noting the actual total remained under 100 by his own count, a figure that sits below the NLA’s official tally but still represents a genuine departure from the near-zero baseline of prior years.

Top auctioneer William Tavares-Finson linked the shift directly to weak auction performance: low sales through the public auction system had pushed lenders toward foreclosure as the more reliable route to actually recovering value from a defaulted mortgage, rather than the newspaper auction listings that, however numerous, were producing few completed sales. Edwin Wint, then immediate past president of the Realtors Association of Jamaica, offered useful international context: Jamaica’s 212 foreclosures did not compare in volume to jurisdictions hit hardest by the global recession, even as the local downturn’s effects had genuinely percolated down to the domestic property market over the prior two to three years.

The National Housing Trust, Jamaica’s largest mortgage provider, remained the notable holdout from the trend: the agency’s stated policy did not include foreclosure at all, preferring instead to auction or privately sell confiscated properties and return any surplus above the outstanding debt to the mortgagor, a structurally gentler approach than the foreclosure route private lenders were increasingly turning to.