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Topic Hub · 35 Guides

REO & Compliance

REO and compliance work carries specific regulatory requirements — FHA timelines, HUD conveyance standards, investor-level documentation, and audit-ready reporting. These guides break down what servicers and vendors need to meet those standards.

Essential Guides

REO Property Preservation: What Servicers and Asset Managers Need to Know

An REO property that sits without preservation loses value by the week. This guide covers everything servicers and asset managers need — initial securing, recurring maintenance, compliance timelines, and how to manage preservation at portfolio scale.

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7 min read

FHA Property Preservation Requirements: What Servicers Must Know

FHA preservation requirements are stricter than conventional REO — shorter timelines, more documentation, and specific conveyance standards that trip up vendors who treat them the same. This breaks down the exact deadlines, photo requirements, and compliance mistakes that trigger chargebacks.

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9 min read

All REO & Compliance Guides

8 min read

Mortgage Servicer Property Preservation Requirements: What CFPB, Fannie Mae, and HUD Require on Vacant Properties

Mortgage servicers are required to inspect, secure, winterize, and maintain vacant properties on delinquent and defaulted loans — and the CFPB is actively examining whether the fees they charge borrowers for that work comply with federal rules. This covers the preservation requirements that Fannie Mae, FHA/HUD, and Regulation X impose on servicers, the timelines they must meet, and what happens when a servicer fails to preserve a property or charges fees it should not.

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6 min read

Code Enforcement Fines for Overgrown Lots: What Cities Charge and How Liens Attach

An overgrown lot is the most common code violation on vacant and rental property — and the most expensive to ignore. Fines range from $50 to $2,000 per day, cities can mow the lot and bill the owner $200 to $500 per visit, and unpaid abatement costs become liens that block sale or refinancing. This covers how the enforcement process works, what it costs, and how to prevent it.

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7 min read

Pittsburgh Vacant Building Enforcement: Section 301.3, the Three-Notice Process, and Act 135 Conservatorship

Pittsburgh's number one code violation is vacant structures and land — Section 301.3 of the Property Maintenance Code. The city enforces through a three-notice process that ends in criminal court, with fines up to $1,000 per day and the possibility of jail time. Pennsylvania's Act 135 adds a separate risk: a third party can petition the court to take control of a blighted property. This explains the full enforcement framework.

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7 min read

Tulsa Vacant Building Rules: Title 55 Standards, Registration, and the New Foreclosure Ordinance

Tulsa enforces vacant building standards under Title 55 of the city code, requires registration of properties with recent code violations, and — as of 2026 — can foreclose on unoccupied properties with more than $1,500 in city abatement liens. This explains what the ordinance requires, what the fines are, and how the new foreclosure authority changes the math for property owners holding vacant buildings.

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7 min read

Dallas Vacant Property Rules: Chapter 27 Standards, Chapter 48B Registration, and What Owners Pay

Dallas enforces vacant property standards through two overlapping ordinances: Chapter 27 (Minimum Property Standards) requires every vacant building to be secured against entry, and Chapter 48B requires vacant buildings to be registered with annual fees. Civil penalties run up to $1,000 per day per violation, and the Municipal Court can order demolition and place a lien on the property. This explains both chapters and what the penalties look like in practice.

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8 min read

New Orleans Blight Ordinance: How Code Enforcement Works and What Property Owners Face

New Orleans runs one of the most active blight enforcement programs in the country, processing thousands of cases a year through its Code Enforcement and Hearings Bureau. A guilty judgment at a blight hearing creates a lien recorded with the mortgage recorder, and the city can clear, demolish, or sell the property at sheriff's sale. This explains every step of the process, from a 311 complaint to lien foreclosure.

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8 min read

Cincinnati Vacant Building Rules: Registration, VBML, and What Property Owners Owe

Cincinnati runs three overlapping programs for vacant properties: a new Vacant Building Registration effective 2026, the Vacant Building Maintenance License for condemned buildings, and the Vacant Foreclosed Property Registration for lender-held property. Fees start at $250 every six months and climb to $3,500 a year for long-vacant buildings. This explains what each program requires and how the costs stack up.

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8 min read

Houston Vacant Building Ordinance: What Property Owners Face Under Chapter 10

Houston classifies every vacant building as a dangerous building under Chapter 10 of the Code of Ordinances — regardless of its physical condition. Fines run $200 to $2,000 per day, and the city can secure the property itself and place a lien on it. This explains what the ordinance actually requires, how enforcement works, and what an owner or servicer has to do to stay compliant.

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9 min read

San Antonio Vacant Building Program: Chapter 12 Registration, the $400–$900 Fee, and the Standard of Care

San Antonio's Vacant Building Program applies inside defined boundaries — the Central Business District, historic and neighborhood conservation districts, and city TIRZ areas, each with a half-mile perimeter; a half-mile around military bases; and 1,000 feet from schools and child-care centers. Inside those lines, Chapter 12 requires registration within 90 days of notice, a $400 or $900 annual fee, a plan of action every six months, and an exterior standard of care that makes plywood a temporary measure only. This explains the boundaries, the fees as updated October 1, 2025, what the city inspects, and what an owner or servicer has to do.

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9 min read

Cleveland Vacant Property Registration: Chapter 3106, the Cash Bond, and the Monthly Inspection Nobody Budgets For

Cleveland registers vacant buildings citywide — there is no district map to check, and the main carve-outs are for government-owned buildings headed for demolition. Chapter 3106 charges $70 per unit for one to three residential units or $1,000 for everything else, attaches a cash bond of $5,000 or $15,000 to non-residential buildings, bans plywood as a standing solution, requires winterization by ordinance, and obliges the responsible party to inspect the property inside and out every month. The pre-sale inspection that applied to one-to-three-unit homes expired on its own terms in February 2026. This explains what the chapter requires, what it costs, and what changed.

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9 min read

Oklahoma City Abandoned Buildings: The Council List, the Quarterly Assessment, and the Lien That Outranks the Mortgage

Most cities make the owner register a vacant building. Oklahoma City inverts it: the City Council holds a hearing, declares the building abandoned, and orders the City Clerk to put it on an abandoned building list. From that point the city assesses its actual regulatory costs quarterly, files a notice of lien before abatement begins, and secures a lien the ordinance makes coequal with ad valorem taxes and superior to all other titles and liens. Getting off the list takes a written petition and a hearing within thirty days; clearing the lien takes full payment, and the fee schedule sets a release administrative cost of up to $550. This explains the trigger, the notice, the costs, and the lien.

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11 min read

Baton Rouge Vacant Property Rules: The Two-Week Clock, $1,000 a Day, and a Lien That Rides Your Tax Bill

Baton Rouge has no vacant property registry, no annual fee and no local agent requirement. What it has instead is a substantive duty with a two-week fuse: once a structure is unoccupied and has gone without running water or electricity for two weeks, leaving it enterable by anything other than a key or forced entry is a violation. The penalty is $1,000 flat, then $117 a day on a residential structure and $1,000 a day on a non-residential one for continuing violation of a hearing officer's order. The hearing officer sits in the Department of Finance, and the resulting lien is recorded as a judicial mortgage and added to the next ad valorem tax bill. This explains the trigger, the board-up specification, the penalties, and where the lien ranks.

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12 min read

Shreveport's Blighted Vacant Structure Registry: A Downtown-Only Program Where the Maintenance Code Is Also the Entry Test

Shreveport adopted a blighted vacant structure registration program in July 2025, and it is unlike the citywide registries in Ohio or Texas in three ways. It applies only inside the downtown commercial historic district and a one-block perimeter. It reaches only structures that are both blighted and vacant, and it defines blight as any structure failing the article's own standard of care — so the maintenance code is simultaneously the compliance standard and the test for whether the program applies. For an owner, nothing is owed until the Director sends written notice, after which there are 90 days — but a creditor's duty runs from filing foreclosure, and a catastrophe starts its own 30-day clock. Registration lasts six months, the fee compounds 50% per renewal to a $3,000 ceiling, and a creditor must register within 30 days of filing foreclosure. This explains the trigger, the fees, the securing rules and the appeal path.

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11 min read

Akron Registers Vacant Commercial Buildings Only: The $300 Fee, the Director-Approved Plan, and Strict Liability

Akron's vacant building registry reaches commercial and industrial buildings and nothing else. A servicer holding vacant Akron houses has nothing to register — there is no vacant residential registration program, and no blight chapter in the code at all. For an empty retail strip, warehouse or plant the duty is real: register within 180 days of last occupancy, pay $300 a year under 10,000 square feet or $500 at or above it, designate a Summit County agent if you are out of area, and submit a vacant building plan the Director must approve. The fee is not the pressure point. The plan forces a choice within a year, and the chapter runs on strict liability with each day a separate offense.

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10 min read

Montgomery Has No Vacant Property Registry: The Board-Up Spec Buried in the Building Code, and the Lien Your Mortgage Outranks

Montgomery got where it is by subtracting local law. It repealed its own unsafe-buildings article in 2006 and never replaced it, declined to create a vacant-structures registration division twice, and cannot adopt a registry under Alabama's 2026 enabling act because that act reaches Class 1 municipalities only — which means Birmingham. What remains is one vacancy-keyed duty, an unusually prescriptive board-up specification sitting inside a technical-code amendment, and a condemnation and cost-assessment process run entirely under state law. For a servicer the headline is the lien: it is superior to everything except taxes and mortgages recorded before it.

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11 min read

Dayton Registers the Foreclosing Lender, Not the Owner: 15 Business Days, $250, and a Status You Cannot Shed by Dismissing

Dayton has no general vacant building registry. What it has is narrower and pointed directly at mortgage servicers: a registration duty that attaches when a foreclosure action is filed on vacant residential property, falls on the "person in control" — a term the ordinance defines to include any mortgagee that has filed foreclosure — and runs for 15 business days. The fee is $250 initially and $50 a year. The status does not end when the foreclosure is dismissed, the authorized agent must be capable of responding within 24 hours, liability is joint and several and reaches a subsequent owner, and the only exemption on offer is a monitored burglar and fire alarm.

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12 min read

Toledo Registers Any Vacant Building With a Residential Unit: $100 a Year, and Non-Registration Counts as Consent to Service by Posting

Toledo's vacant building registry is the mirror image of Akron's. It reaches any vacant building with at least one residential unit, citywide and regardless of unit count, and the code contains no vacancy registry for wholly non-residential property. The front end is light — a flat $100 a year, no bond, no escalating ladder, and interior inspections expressly not required. The severity is somewhere else: "registrant" names mortgagees, assignees of rents and receivers, binds a foreclosing lender until title passes to a third party, demands an agent with an office in Lucas County or an adjacent county, and treats a failure to register as consent to service by posting on the building itself. Marketing the property does not exempt it.

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12 min read

Scranton Registers the Mortgage, Not Just the Building: $45 for Vacancy, $200 for Default, and the Second One Reaches Occupied Houses

Scranton's registry has two tracks that work on completely different triggers. The vacant track costs $45 a year and attaches when a structure sits unoccupied for more than thirty days without being actively marketed. The abandoned track costs $200 a year, attaches on mortgage default, lis pendens, foreclosure, a tax deed application or a deed in lieu, and applies "whether vacant or occupied" — so it reaches a house someone is living in. The duty on that track falls on the mortgagee by name: inspect on default, register within ten days, and keep re-inspecting monthly for as long as the property stays occupied and in default. Article III carries no notice, hearing or appeal of its own.

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12 min read

Harrisburg Has No Vacancy Registry at All: It Registers Foreclosures, at $200 Every Six Months, Occupied or Not

Harrisburg has no ordinance requiring anyone to register a building because it is vacant. What it has is a foreclosure property registry, and the duty sits on the lender from the moment a mortgage foreclosure action is filed. Inspect the property, register within ten days, say whether it is vacant or occupied — and if it is occupied, inspect it again every month to verify that. The fee is $200 per property every six months, not annually, and the codified fee appendix still says otherwise. Three things catch REO buyers afterwards: a city deed registry with a thirty-day filing duty, a twenty-day meeting requirement after transfer, and forty-five days to abate whatever the inspection finds.

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12 min read

Little Rock Has No Vacant Property Registry: 15 Days to Start, 90 to Finish, and a Lien on a Vacant Structure That Can Prime Your Mortgage

Little Rock registers nothing. There is no vacant property registry, no registration fee, no annual renewal, and no definition of "vacant", "abandoned" or "blighted" anywhere in the code. The duty attaches when the building official declares a structure dangerous or unfit and placards it — fifteen days to initiate repairs, ninety to complete them. The exposure a servicer should plan around is in state law rather than the ordinance: on an unsafe and vacant structure, Arkansas lets a city ask a court to give its clean-up lien priority over a previously recorded mortgage, and one of the stated grounds is that the lienholder failed to foreclose after default.

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8 min read

Conveyance Condition: Preparing REO Properties for Transfer

A property that fails conveyance gets sent back — and every day it sits costs the servicer money. This covers what HUD, VA, and GSE investors actually require for conveyance, the preparation steps that prevent rejection, and the specific condition issues that trigger re-inspection.

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4 min read

What Is Conveyance Condition in Property Preservation?

Conveyance condition is the standard a foreclosed property must meet before being transferred to HUD, VA, or a GSE. Properties that fail conveyance get sent back at the servicer's expense. Here's what each agency requires and the specific issues that trigger rejection.

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Property Preservation17 guides
Field Operations26 guides
Commercial & Institutional18 guides
Property Types24 guides
Seasonal & Regional14 guides
Risk & Insurance9 guides

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