Posted on 03/30/2015 9:14:54 AM PDT by Theoria
In September, Susan Rodolfi celebrated an unusual anniversary: five years of missed mortgage payments.
She is like a ghost of the housing market’s painful past, one of thousands of Americans who have skipped years of mortgage payments and are still living in their homes.
Now a legal quirk could bring a surreal ending to her foreclosure case and many others around the country: They may get to keep their homes without ever having to pay another dime.
The reason, lawyers for homeowners argue, is that the cases have dragged on too long.
There are tens of thousands of homeowners who have missed more than five years of mortgage payments, many of them clustered in states like Florida, New Jersey and New York, where lenders must get judges to sign off on foreclosures.
However, in a growing number of foreclosure cases filed when home prices collapsed during the financial crisis, lenders may never be able to seize the homes because the state statutes of limitations have been exceeded, according to interviews with housing lawyers and a review of state and federal court decisions.
“No one gets a free house,” Judge Michael B. Kaplan of the United States Bankruptcy Court in Trenton wrote in an opinion late last year, reflecting what he characterized as a longstanding “admonition” he and others made during the foreclosure crisis. But after effectively ending a New Jersey homeowner’s foreclosure case in November because the state’s six-year statute of limitations had expired, he wrote in his opinion, “With a proper measure of disquiet and chagrin, the court now must retreat from this position.”
It is difficult to know for sure how many foreclosure cases are still grinding through the court systems since the financial crisis.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Now we know why 40% of delinquent borrowers have not made payments for two or more years. They hired a lawyer and are trying to delay the foreclosure until statue of limitations expires.
I am thinking the bank will not be able to foreclose but the “homeowner” will never be able to get clear title to the home. Every real estate transaction comes with a title search and I serious doubt that a clear title will be able to be obtained.
Agreed.
Not making mortgage payments as part of a contract simply because the home lost value and not returning the property to the lienholder is theft.
My home lost value, yet I kept making my payments, as any honest person would do.
We’re all paying/gonna pay for this...
How can statue of limitations expire when each monthly payment missed is a new date for reason of forclosure!!!
The laws in those states needs to be changed so that it doesn’t take a jdge/court to forclose!
Throw their sorry asses out in the street.
Maybe Peggy Joseph was correct after all...
No one is obligated to get involved with a bank. The war against them is just stupid.
You don’t believe me See post #24
That can’t be it, all they have to do is go to the County Recoders office and see who holds the lean. (sarc)
That's kind of ironic because about six years ago my family was bidding on a lovely property in Wyoming that had been foreclosed upon. The previous owners had spent lavishly on the place and we ended up buying it for about 20% of what they'd spent on it. There's no way we'd have been able to afford this place in a normal circumstance.
The judicial process (in those states) has been s-l-o-w.
If the bank rules were changed so that the banks have to start writing down the asset-value of the loan if the payments are more then two months behind, then they would be faster to foreclose, and faster to sell the foreclosed house rather than keep it on the books and pretend it still had full value.
The statute of limitations starts running when the plaintiff (here, the Bank) has the right to apply to the Court for relief. If the statutory limitations period runs without application for relief, the claim becomes barred.
I wonder how many time this situation has come up: banks or the holders of mortgages cannot establish clear title of ownership of the debt instrument, given that the original mortgage has been bundled or resold multiple times. I bet there are situations where the supposed mortgage holder does not even know where the house is located. The debtor should not be rewarded for non payment nor should the mortgage holder be rewarded if they failed to do proper due diligence and legal filings to protect their legal interests.
And there can be no doubt whatsoever that, like LBJ said, these people and their offspring will vote Democrat for the next 200 years.
You can only default on a debt once. Once the debt is in default then it is in default.
And requiring a court to approve foreclosure prevents the kinds of injustices we saw during the 2008 foreclosure crisis when banks administratively foreclosed on properties that they didn’t even have title to!
Banks are not subject to such archaic laws.
I suspect that, in many cases, the homes were underwater and the banks made a calculated decision that it was better to have a delinquent borrower at least paying upkeep on the property.
Banks, just like borrowers, will sometimes choose to just walk away from underwater properties. There are whole neighborhoods in the Mon Valley like this. Detroit is actually paying to demolish these type of homes.
If you live in an area where homes sell with relative ease, it would not be wise to try this. The lender will foreclose on you just as soon as they are able to do so and the home will belong to someone else within a matter of weeks, tops.
As this continues to escalate over time, can the collapse of the U.S. economy be far off?
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