Schaumburg looking for abandoned building owners

Home foreclosures and business closings are not a new phenomenon in a community as large as Schaumburg.

But the increased numbers of the past year or two led trustees Tuesday to require owners of abandoned buildings to provide contact information to the village in order to be reachable on maintenance issues.

Village Manager Ken Fritz said Schaumburg isn't facing an especially high number of foreclosures, but the true owners of some foreclosed homes have been particularly hard to find.

One of the prime examples, however, started as something other than a typical foreclosure.

A house on the 200 block of Monson Court in the Lexington Fields South subdivision was seized by federal marshals in 2006 after it was found to be the base of an unlicensed, international money-transmitting business and its owner became a fugitive.

After that, as the property experienced maintenance issues including overgrown grass and damage from a major storm, village officials struggled through a series of property transfers to find the correct out-of-state financial institution that owned it.

But officials hope their new requirement will make such problems a thing of the past without being a burden to banks and other institutional property owners.

"We'll send out notices to all the financial institutions registered in the village," Fritz said of the new requirement. "It's not something easy to administer, but it gives us something to fall back on."

Trustee George Dunham, who chairs the village's finance and legal committee and lives near a number of foreclosed homes, agreed.

"I hope it works and it's not like we're trying to do it for any punitive reason," Dunham said.

Though the new requirement affects both homes and business properties, the owners of commercial buildings have generally proved easier to identify, Fritz said.

Own: Village wants to be able to reach true owners