Posted on 05/25/2010 1:30:38 PM PDT by longtermmemmory
--SNIP--
Partly responsible: a new Florida Supreme Court rule that requires lenders to verify they are the actual owners of a home before making the initial case for foreclosure.
Show me the "note," in other words.
The problem is that the notes — legal promises from borrowers to repay a debt — have been sold and resold, bundled into securities, scanned into computers, sealed in unknown vaults and lost in other ways as homes got caught up in the puzzling markets of the real estate boom.
"The original note is something very significant, and they just seem to have lost thousands of them," said Boca Raton attorney Marlyn Wiener, who handles real estate cases. "Nobody knows where the stuff is."
The new rule was approved in February with the intention of unclogging the foreclosure courts, which have an estimated statewide backlog of 500,000 cases. It also gives judges power to sanction plaintiffs who make false accusations on the ownership of notes or missing notes.
"I believe it has affected the number of new filings," said Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Meenu Sasser, who handles the county's foreclosures. "It streamlines the process."
Law firms handling the foreclosure overload, sometimes called foreclosure mills, have routinely filed a "lost note" claim with the original default notice, regardless of whether they looked for the note, said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey.
The legal move gives lenders a statutory out if the original note truly can't be located. When asked what efforts were made to find the note, however, such statements as "searched file cabinet" and "searched fire proof safe" have appeared on several court records.
"It was very confusing. How can you foreclose on the note if the note is lost?" Bailey said.
(Excerpt) Read more at sun-sentinel.com ...
You’d have to show somehow that it was transferred each time.
Realistically not hard to do, no more so than proving a house itself has been sold a few times. Not hard at all if you’re paying attention DURING the transfer of the note, but with the history of some of these lenders, “paying attention” seems to slip right out the window.
same with me.I can’t shed a tear for the bank that were participating in the risky trading.
>>Loans are sold all the time. This is nothing new.<<
Among other things, it is about volume. The issue is not the fact that the loan was sold. I think it is the way it’s done today. And how it is resold, and resold, and resold.
” Or how about them seizing property they don’t even hold a mrtgage on? “
Hey - that’s the exclusive perogative of Governments and Homeowners’ Associations...
>>We’re current on our mortgage but if our current mortgage ‘owner’ were to try to foreclose on us this is the first trick I’d try.<<
Exactly! Step one of any foreclosure process is to prove you have the authority to foreclose.
Sort of like what happened to me. A credit card company contacted me about a balance on my ex-wife’s credit card demanding full payment.
Told ‘em to show me where I’d signed a credit card agreement. Told me they had one since their computer said they did and that it would be too much trouble to find the original. Told ‘em it would be ‘too much trouble for me to write them a check’. Told me they’d put it on my credit report. Told ‘em they’d have to remove it when they couldn’t produce my signiture on the card agreement. They never called back.
My parents paid $60 a month rent for a three bedroom home back in the early 60’s. Now they pay $1000 a month in property taxes on a four bedroom home on an acre.
Let’s be frank. It’s rent. Nobody owns real estate in this country. You rent it from the government.
>>If so, I could forsee thousands if not millions of people stopping their mortgage payments since the note holder would have no recourse. Is my thinking flawed?<<
When I first heard about this problem a few years ago it is one thing I was wondering about too.
It's not only that. There are Federal regulations governing Records Retention. I used to work at a bank doing nothing but that. I won't say exactly where but in the city of Chicago there's an entire 10 story building almost a block long that's full of nothing but one banks paperwork dating back nearly a century.
There was an entire Department at this bank, coincidentally enough known as the Records Management Department, that did nothing but keep track of all this paper and manage them from cradle to grave according to the Retention Requirements.
So like I said if these institutions didn't keep their paperwork straight I have no sympathy for them. This society lets criminals walk over chain of custody issues almost day. Banks should be held to the very same standard.
Bailey, who was on the foreclosure task force, said the rule wasn’t needed before the real estate boom when home loans were more straightforward and foreclosures fewer.
“There’s some weird stuff going on,” she said.
Yes. Yes there is.
I cannot speak to how this works in all states, but I can speak with some experience in at least three states:
When you have a mortgage or other loan secured by your house/property, there should be a lien notation on your “record of deed,” “title” or whatever they call your deed document in your state (this varies from state to state). The deed is recorded with your county recorder.
Now, I’ve seen very sloppy loan record keeping in my life. I’ll give you one example:
We were buying two pivots to put on our farm, and investigating financing them through a lender in Nebraska. Our farm was in Nevada. We never went through with the loan, NEVER signed and returned the documents (after reading the fine print, there was a fundamental disconnect between their loan practices and living in a community property state) and we never communicated in any way (verbal, fax, email or writing) that we were going forward with their loan.
Yet they had already sent the legal docs over to the county recorder and placed an “UCC Lien” (where “UCC” stands for “Uniform Commerce Clause”) on our farm. Since we were good friends with everyone in the recorder’s office and we lived in the county seat, we heard about this lien on our property the day it was placed.
Well, you can bet that I was hopping mad. We hadn’t even sent in the loan papers and the bank had already encumbered our property. I called the president of the bank the next morning and told him that a) we weren’t using their bank because their ideas about women and property were straight out of Sharia and b) they could remove their premature UCC lien that day, or I’d have a lawyer crawl up his ass with a speculum.
It was at that point in 2001 that I ceased to have any respect for banks or bankers. Everything since that point has been mere reinforcement of my experience. They’re sloppy, they’re arrogant and they think that they’re doing you a favor by even talking to you.
Righto. I never have and never will ‘buy’ real estate.
”It was very confusing. How can you foreclose on the note if the note is lost?”
“How do you redeem a winning lotto ticket if you lost the ticket?”
How do you become President of the United States without a valid birth certificate?
I’m just sayin’,...
I asked when this device was delivered and it was months after the date my divorce was final. It seems the ex had shown an old copy of my medical insurance card when she ordered it.
Now that's fraud right there and I told them so. The person on the phone said it was 'customary' for them to put me in Collections anyway. I told them it was 'customary' for me to sue their asses off as well as to refer them for criminal prosecution.
Have you tried contacting your state’s attorney general? Or even local Better Business Bureau? If they had to face down a formal complaint and/or investigation, they might quit hassling you.
That happened to me with AT&T several years ago. I had locked long distance calling out of my land line. I used DSL for my computer and my son went to some web site that charged for some sort of pr0n stuff. Apparently a country called VUSA or something like that was where they were headquartered - I forget the details.
Bottom line is that they charged it as long distance to my Qwest bill via ATT to the tune of about $150. A year later they were still trying to get the money out of me and I finally told the lady that if they would simply send me a bill explaining what I owed money for, I’d be happy to respond. Naturally they didn’t have it, but they threatened to sue. I told them to bring it on. That was 8 years ago. Never heard back and there is nothing on my credit to suggest there was anything there. It was a scam that AT&T was actually making good money on. They were “unofficially” in bed together with that sleazy company.
But likewise here. Until they show proof that they have a claim, fuggetaboutit.
I agree, if they cannot produce the note...there is no debt.
One of the reasons I “bought” my farm in central Kentucky is that the property taxes are lower than a phone bill.
This is why Sherif and Recorder of Deeds are elected offices.
If I were running for either office. “Crossing the T’s and Dotting the I’s” would be my campaign issue/slogan.
Bank of America ended up with my note. It was a happy day when I paid off the last 8 years in a lump sum in 2008 and will not have to deal with them again.
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