NeighborWorks, Ad Council Team Up for Foreclosure Prevention PSAs

NeighborWorks America said today that it has partnered with the Ad Council — producers of the ubiquitous public service ads nearly all of us have seen — to further extend awareness of NeighborWorks’ foreclosure prevention efforts.

The television and radio public service announcements shown at the campaign launch today are expected to begin airing in early July. Print and Internet-targeted spots will follow. The public service announcements, and more information about the campaign, are available on the campaign’s web site, www.ForeclosureHelpandHope.org.

The press release also carried this little tidbit in it, apparently the outcome of some research conducted by the NeighborWorks organization:

Importantly, research highlighted today by NeighborWorks America shows that homes that are not directly foreclosed upon can also be affected by foreclosure. Research showed that homes that are close to those that were foreclosed upon lose nearly one percent of their value for each foreclosed property within an eighth of a mile. For hard-hit neighborhoods around the country where dozens of homes within blocks of each other have been foreclosed upon, neighboring homeowners can expect their home values to drop by 10 percent or more. (emphasis added)

I don’t know that the finding here should surprise any of us — Freddie’s HomeSteps program, for example, has long been an advocate of neighborhood stability — but it is certainly interesting to see it quantified.

(FWIW, I went to the NeighborWorks Web site to try and find a copy of this study, but it doesn’t seem to be available. If anyone has a copy of it, I’d be highly interested to see it.)