Click the play button above to hear more from Sen. Brown and a local homeowner who had to fight to keep her home.

The companies had been accused of improperly moving ahead with mass foreclosures, without examining each individual case. Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine had pressed the settlement that he says will mean about $200 million dollars total for Ohio victims of the scandal.

“It’s not going to make them whole, it’s not going to bring their house back. But it is some kind of compensation,” DeWine says.

The five mortgage companies agreeing to pay the money include: Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo. In addition to this money for homeowners, the national settlement includes money for the STATES. Ohio is using that part to demolish abandoned foreclosed houses that are dragging down property values in many neighborhoods.

Click the play button above to hear an extended conversation with Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine.

Attorney General Mike DeWine says Ohio’s share of the settlement equals $335-million to be used to help borrowers who lost homes to foreclosure and those whose homes are underwater or no longer worth the amount of the mortgage.

The A.G.’s office will receive $97 million to create foreclosure prevention programs and to revitalize blighted neighborhoods.

DeWine’s office says more than 85-thousand Ohioans filed for foreclosure in 2010 and one in three mortgage holders is underwater.

The settlement is with Ally, Bank of America, Citi, JPMorganChase and Wells Fargo.

Click the play button at the top of the page to hear a full report from Ohio Public Radio’s Bill Cohen.

Foreclosed home sale prices increased almost seven percent in Columbus during the third quarter of last year. Across the state, foreclosure sale prices jumped nearly four percent.

RealtyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist tracks the numbers.

“The prices have come down so much that finally buyers are moving slowly more into the market and buying these properties…the stronger demand is helping to push the prices slightly up,” Blomquist said.

Blomquist said he’s seeing similar increases in Detroit and Phoenix. But he stressed these are very slight increases.

And prospective buyers searching for a good deal on a foreclosed property, Blomquist said, do have to rush out and buy one tomorrow. He expects the increases in sale prices will be gradual due, in part, to more foreclosed properties hitting the market this year.

“We do have still some of this distressed inventory that’s going to be coming on line and keeping home prices from skyrocketing,” he said.

And while the number of overall home sales is up in Columbus and Ohio, about 13 percent, the number of foreclosed homes sold was down considerably in the third quarter last year. Blomquist said the decrease is from foreclosure processing delays, and he expects to see an increase in foreclosure sales this year.

“It’s the end of the road. It’s time to go.”

That’s what Dee Baker said of her friend’s home that was sold at the Franklin County Sheriff’s auction on Friday. Baker’s also employed in the mortgage industry at Huntington Bank.

“The individual who was in the home, supposed to be making payments, I believe his business failed. So he had no income and was not able to keep the house,” Baker said. Stories like Baker’s friend have been commonplace for a few years now, and according to some industry experts, they likely will be for some time.

In the first quarter of this year, Franklin County saw almost 2,800 home foreclosures – a nearly 14 percent increase over the same period last year. Sherry Dufford, who works in the real estate office at the Franklin County Sheriff’s office, gave a snap shot of what a typical week looks like.

“One day I got 83. The next day I got 68. One day I received 47. And another day I received 65,” Dufford said. In case you can’t add that fast, that’s 263 new foreclosed properties in one week that are up for auction.

“It’s been like this for us for the last since the last time you’d called in for the interview,” she said.

WOSU last spoke with Dufford in October 2008. At that time there were as many as 230 properties pending sheriff’s sale a week. Almost two years later, more than 800 are scheduled for auction just in the next month.

While Dufford said she’s hearing from attorneys that foreclosures are slacking off, she said they’re not on her end.

“I don’t know if it’s something they already had in the process, and it finally got to the point where they could file. I’m not quite sure. I mean, the opinion of everybody in here, we’re not seeing it slow down for us because we have not seen numbers being reduced dramatically. Just for the example of last week: All those orders of sales we got in each day. To me, I don’t, I don’t think it’s slowing down,” Dufford said.

The reason why Dufford has not noticed a decline in the number of homes up for auction is because the number of filings continues to increase. At least that’s what Linda Cook said. She’s an attorney at the Ohio Poverty Law Center and works in foreclosures.

“I think that there’s just more people that are delinquent and I think banks and lenders are just working their way through that,” Cook said.

The number mortgage foreclosures reached a crisis level about five years ago in Franklin County. And last year, Franklin County saw 9,500 foreclosures. Cook said while the number of filings appears to be leveling off now they’re still in her words “unacceptably high.”

“They continue to go up, but not quite at the rate as they did say in the jump from 2000 to 2006, which there were just incredible increases every year,” she said.

Amy Klaben with the Columbus Housing Partnership would probably agree. Klaben’s their CEO and has seen the number of people lose their homes increase drastically over the last five years.

The Columbus Housing Partnership, which offers a variety of free services for people facing foreclosure and job loss, has gone from seeing 250 clients a year to about 1,600. And there’s no end in sight.

“The people who are behind on their mortgages still have a way to go before there’s resolution. And until we see a major change in the economy, locally, with jobs, we will continue to see people having difficulty paying their loans,” Klaben said.

Sub-prime mortgages kicked off the foreclosure crisis. Then astronomical unemployment rates fed it. Linda Cook said some experts are worried there will be another huge wave of defaults as adjustable rate mortgages reset next year.

“That’s going to be a problem for people who have their payments adjust in the current economic climate in Ohio with the double-digit unemployment rates. It’s going to be a real problem for people who are now may be struggling to make their payments, but are making their payments, when their payments adjust upward – because they never go down,” Cook said.

Dee Baker see a similar picture from her view at Huntington Bank. She said a return to what she called a “normal” housing market is still several years away.

“I think we will not return to what is considered “normal” until around 2013. The key to recovery is employment,” Baker said.

A federal program for counseling homeowners in financial trouble has been cut from $180 million to $65 million. Meanwhile, $1.5 billion in foreclosure prevention money has been earmarked for five states, and Ohio isn’t one of them.

Since then, it’s been in limbo in the Senate. Backers finally convinced the Senate Finance Committee to hold its first hearing on the measure today, but Republicans who dominate the panel still appear skeptical.

Statehouse correspondent Bill Cohen reports .

“Overgrown grass, all the plants, trees, everything is overgrown and dying.”

Muirfield resident Jennifer Miller is describing lawn of a foreclosed home on Memorial Drive. On the Franklin County Sheriff’s website, the house is appraised at $600,000. Miller says the owners relocated for a new job and were unable to sell the house. Since then, people have broken in multiple times.

“So police have been out here several times to kind of make sure everything’s under control. Because for the neighbors – obviously there are children that live in this area and they don’t want that kind of thing going on,” says Miller.

At least one of the subdivision’s foreclosures was the result of a money laundering scam. Muirfield resident John Warner says authorities should have noticed immediately when a house on Quin Abbey Court sold for much more than it was worth.

“The house sat empty for two years for sale for a million bucks. All the sudden, it sold for $1.6 million. That’s a little surprise, isn’t it?” says Warner.

The people associated with that and other suspicious sales were eventually indicted. The house will be rehabbed by what Warner describes as a “reputable” real estate agent. But he says the house has suffered from years of neglect.

“There are mold problems, the electricity went off, the basement flooded, they had to rip everything out. You know, when that happens, you get mold throughout the house, it goes up inside the walls and everything else. So, they’ve really got their hands full,” says Warner.

Community Research Partners says — out of 620 homes –Muirfield Village had nine foreclosure filings last year. That works out to about 1 in every 69 homes. That may not seem like much, but RealtyTrac – a website that tracks home foreclosures — says the July average in Ohio was 1 in every 460 homes.

Jung Kim is the Data Services Director at Community Research Partners, or CRP. Kim says Sheriff Sales – when a house gets sold at public auction – make up a higher percentage of Columbus suburban home sales than people might think.

“Fifteen percent of housing sales are sheriff sales. So even in those areas where people might think, ‘Oh, you know, this is not a problem here,’ – and it’s not as big a problem as in low income neighborhoods – it’s still very present,” says Kim.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development – or HUD – certifies Foreclosure Counselors to help homeowners save their houses. Denise Gastesi is a Foreclosure Intervention Specialist at the Franklin County Treasurer’s Office. Gastesi says sometimes upper-income homeowners are hesitant to use those services.

“And I think in the suburbs sometimes they’re even more reluctant to seek help because they think that, ‘Well, I’m not low-income, I don’t need to go to one of those agencies.” And it’s important for them to know that HUD-certified just means that they’re not one of the scam artists out there,” says Gastesi.

CRP reports there have been 28 foreclosure filings in Muirfield Village in the past three years – just under 5% of homes in the development.