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Politics & Government

Signs of Continued Recession in County Clerk's Numbers

Clerk points to drop in mortgages, passports as economic indicators

The recession-ravaged real estate picture in Ocean County is likely to remain grim this year, according to a projection by County Clerk Scott M. Colabella, whose office records the deeds and mortgages that memorialize land buying and selling in the shore county.

“It’s very conservative, but the same for 2011,’’ Colabella said of the outlook he gave the county’s freeholders. They want to know how much revenue to expect from realty transfer fees collected based on property transactions.

For 2010 that amounted to $10 million to the county government and $30 million to the state, he explained, a far cry from 2005, when the real estate bubble was inflating. That year the county got $21 million in revenue from the clerk’s office.

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“The proof will be in the pudding,’’ Colabella said of his forecast. “We’re steady with last January’s pace, but January was horrible for real estate,’’ he said of the frequent snowstorms.

There have been peaks and valleys in the county’s real estate market before, but this valley is deeper than any in the last 30 years.

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The clerk said there was a hiccup in the number of deeds recorded last year, 16,553 compared with 16,213 in 2009, but 35,386 deeds were recorded in 2004, about 1,100 more than the 34,248 in 1987. The recession that followed that real estate bubble saw the number of deeds plunge to 18,105 in 1991 before the rebound began the following year.

If there were a few more real estate sales, the number of mortgages plunged, from 31,349 in 2009 to 25,932 last year. Colabella said even with near record low interest rates, the “rigid requirements of the banks,’’ prevented a lot of people from refinancing their mortgages to take advantage of those rates.

“It’s a 180 degree turnaround,’’ from the loose lending practices that resulted in 80,409 mortgages being closed and recorded in 2006, he said.

He pointed to the number of passports issued by his office as another indicator of the depth of the recession. In 2006 his office issued about 25,000 passports. By 2009 that number dropped to 15,568.

The clerk reported a boom in the number of people using mail-in ballots.

“That has just skyrocketed,’’ he said.

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