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City officials are hoping a new agreement with a Florida-based company helps McKeesport do a better job tracking absentee landlords.

Council this month approved a contract with Federal Property Registration Corp. of Melbourne, Fla., authorizing the company to create an online database of all foreclosed homes in the city.

While FPRC --- which, despite its name, is not a federal agency --- will only track bank-owned properties, Mayor Mike Cherepko says the city will use the software to track other problem properties --- including rentals.

Under an ordinance passed by a 7-0 council vote, anyone foreclosing on a property in McKeesport will be required to pay a $200 fee to register the property in FPRC's database. As part of the registration, the foreclosure agency will have to provide the name and contact information for the property's legal owner, as well as contact information for a local property manager.

Half of the registration fee will be shared with McKeesport, which is the first city in Western Pennsylvania to partner with FPRC. Susquehanna and Swatara townships in central Pennsylvania are also using FPRC to register foreclosed properties.

Company officials told city council most of their work until now has been in Florida, which is among the states hardest hit by the burst of the so-called "housing bubble" and the resulting waves of mortgage defaults. According to the national real estate data service RealtyTrac, more than 174,000 homes in Florida are either owned by banks, or in the process of being repossessed.

Fort Myers, Titusville, New Port Richey and Homestead are among the Florida cities currently using FPRC. According to ordinances from those cities obtained by the Almanac, they charge $150 to $200 for banks to register with the FPRC website.

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The new ordinance will require any lender who forecloses on a home in McKeesport to register at FPRC's website and provide the name of a local contact person. "Any authorized city official can look at the database --- your fire department, police department, zoning," said Ted Mucellin, an attorney with FPRC.

The city's agreement with the company allows McKeesport officials to enter any property they want into the database. "We can also submit any other properties that are dilapidated, which allows us to track them and know where our problems are," Cherepko said.

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Problems with vacant properties --- uncut grass, broken windows, vandalism --- "tend to snowball," said Kevin Sidella, a Swatara Township commissioner who came to McKeesport to meet with Cherepko and city council. With bank-owned properties, it can become difficult to find a responsible party.

"You get to a point where you can't figure out who the owner is, and you get very frustrated," Sidella said. Filing liens against a property doesn't address the immediate issues and only makes the house harder to sell, he said.

RealtyTrac estimates that 25,000 homes in Pennsylvania are in foreclosure, with about 78 in McKeesport, Liberty, Port Vue, Versailles and White Oak.

Published reports indicate that the rate of foreclosures is far outstripping the ability of banks to re-sell those homes, and at least some analysts say Bank of America --- which owns an estimated one out of five foreclosed homes --- is now the largest landlord in the United States.

FPRC was founded by former bankers and is working to build relationships with the largest owners of foreclosed properties, including Bank of America, Mucellin said. The database "isn't a silver bullet" to deal with blight, but does save time for code-enforcement officers by creating "a series of shortcuts," he said.

"It's simply a tool, a resource, to stop your employees from having to spend so much time, looking up the owners of properties," Mucellin said.

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