More than 38 percent of homes in foreclosure in St. Petersburg's 33708 zip code were sitting empty in the third quarter of 2026, the highest zombie rate of any zip code ATTOM had enough data to rank. New Port Richey's 34652 made the top five at 32.6 percent. Both sit in the Tampa Bay area, and both highlight a property maintenance gap that's easy to overlook: homes the owner has walked away from before the lender has taken title.
The numbers come from ATTOM's Q3 2026 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report. Of the country's 104.6 million residential properties, 259,666 were in the foreclosure process during the quarter, and 8,482 of those, about 3.3 percent, were zombies. That was a slight dip from 3.4 percent the quarter before. The overall national vacancy rate held at 1.3 percent, unchanged from the previous quarter and from a year earlier.
Why Zombie Homes Fall Through the Property Maintenance Cracks
An REO has a clear owner. Once a foreclosure is complete, the lender holds title and usually has a servicer and a vendor network assigned to the house. A zombie property sits in the gap before that, when the borrower has already moved out but the foreclosure hasn't finished. Florida is a judicial foreclosure state, so every case has to work its way through the courts, and the house stays in limbo for as long as the case does. Often nobody is mowing, nobody is checking the roof after a storm and nobody notices when a window gets broken.
The same report found that vacancy runs higher among investor owned homes. Out of 24.9 million properties owned by institutional investors, 879,532, or 3.5 percent, were vacant in the third quarter. That's more than double the national rate, and it means a meaningful share of the country's empty homes belong to owners managing them from a distance rather than living down the street. For those owners, regular inspections and a reliable local property maintenance vendor are often the only way to know what's actually happening at the property.
Vacant Property Maintenance Before the Bank Takes Over
In Florida, the practical risk is the condition a house is in by the time the foreclosure finally closes. A home that sat empty through a hot, wet summer can come out the other side with mold, overgrown landscaping, a failing pool and a list of code violations attached to the address. Code enforcement officers respond to an overgrown yard or an open window whether or not anyone lives there, and the fines keep adding up whether or not anyone is opening the mail. Servicers who start vacant property inspections as soon as a loan shows signs of abandonment are in a far better position than those who wait for title to transfer.
Zombie homes are still a small slice of the overall market, and the national rate barely moved this quarter. But in the specific pockets where they cluster, like parts of Pinellas and Pasco counties, one neglected house can affect the look and value of a whole street. Keeping up vacant property maintenance during the wait is almost always cheaper than fixing what the wait leaves behind.