Documents insufficient in foreclosure case. Foreclosure Mills could lose licenses
March 8, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
Tom Lyons, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
When a ruling is reversed by an appellate court, the judge faulted sometimes grumbles.
So I didn’t know what to expect when I asked Circuit Court Judge Robert Bennett about an appellate court ruling that overturned a house foreclosure he had granted.
The three-judge panel said a bank that was not the original lender had not proven it had the right to foreclose, because the documents filed did not show how, or if, mortgage ownership had ever been transferred to the bank.
Bennett’s reaction?
The higher court was totally right, he said.
“I’m willing to fall on my sword on this one,” Bennett said. “It wasn’t a very good piece of judge work.”
To be fair, many judges have done much the same thing in similar cases, partly because most foreclosures had long been so routine. If contested at all, it was rare that anyone claimed a major financial institution had not proven any link to the mortgage.
Now, just a couple of years since Bennett’s ruling on a foreclosure case he cannot even recall, that sort of claim has become commonplace. Of the dozen or so lawyers I’ve heard from who fight foreclosures — a common specialty these days — all mentioned that issue.
“This issue of standing, it’s common throughout the state,” said circuit Chief Judge Lee Haworth.
Many mortgages from the past decade were sold, packaged together, and resold as securities. Showing ownership of just one became complicated, especially because transfer paperwork was often not done for each mortgage.
Law firms that some call “foreclosure mills” handle loan default cases by the thousands for financial institutions that were not the original lenders. Some have filed odd documents in their court cases.
Read more here: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100307/COLUMNIST/3071071?p=all&tc=pgall
Bogus foreclosure claim not isolated
Tom Lyons, Sarasota Herald-Tribune
The way a Sarasota man almost lost his home after bogus claims by out-of-town foreclosure attorneys made a good front-page story.
It may be rare that Berta got a judge to overturn a foreclosure sale on his Sarasota homestead by asserting he was never served with foreclosure papers. As you may have read in Monday’s Herald-Tribune, the foreclosure attorney claimed Berta could not be found and therefore his house was abandoned. That despite the fact Berta is a local business owner who was easily findable.
Still, if that were an isolated glitch, I might not be doing a column. But there’s much evidence, as the Florida Bar has confirmed, that some bulk-rate foreclosure firms are seriously cutting corners. And why not?
They can usually file sloppy documents with unverified and false claims and get away with it, because most foreclosures are not contested. Usually, nobody even skims through the documents.
A recent court ruling says judges don’t need to. The checking is up to homeowners.
That has led to filings so ridiculous that I thought anti-foreclosure lawyer April Charney was kidding when she e-mailed a recent find from Lee County. It is a template, a fill-in-the-blanks foreclosure document, that foreclosure-mill lawyers filed in court as a real one, with almost nothing filled in.
Read more here: http://www.heraldtribune.com/article/20100223/COLUMNIST/2231020/-1/NEWSSITEMAP?p=all&tc=pgall
FL Justice Rule: Lenders Must Verify They Are The Owner Of The Note
February 15, 2010 by admin · Leave a Comment
By BILL KACZOR, Associated Press
Lenders will be required to pick up the tab for investigating and verifying ownership and then try mediation before foreclosing Florida home mortgages under new rules approved Thursday by the Florida Supreme Court.
The rules are designed to help Florida’s judicial system better cope with a flood of foreclosures. They follow a December administrative order by Chief Justice Peggy telling local judges to adopt a uniform mediation program.
Florida has the nation’s fourth-highest foreclosure rate. Almost 400,000 cases were filed in Florida’s courts last year.
The rules and corresponding legal forms were proposed by a pair of Florida Bar panels.
“They found that many cases were being filed by plaintiffs that didn’t’ own the mortgages any more,” said Miami lawyer Mark Romance, who chairs the Civil Procedures Rules Committee.
Romance said other cases were being filed against people who no longer owned the homes.
“I don’t think there was any ill will or intent to harm someone,” Romance said.
The investigate-and-verify rule should help prevent those kinds of errors and give judges greater authority to sanction lenders who do make false allegations, the justices wrote.
“It’s just going to be another hoop to jump through,” said Anthony DiMarco, executive vice president for public Affairs for the Florida Bankers Association, which opposed that provision. “It’s making us find a document we’re already supposed to find.”
Read more here: http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=9816642
Lenders Cry Foul Against Judges For Enforcing The Law
December 28, 2009 by admin · Leave a Comment
By Amir Efrati, WSJ
A group of state and federal judges presiding over foreclosures are wiping away borrowers’ mortgage debt, invalidating foreclosure sales and even barring some foreclosures outright.
The decisions in recent months by a handful of judges in states including Massachusetts, New York and Texas mark a new phase in the judiciary’s battle to stem the rising tide of foreclosures by punishing mortgage companies for paperwork mistakes and alleged mistreatment of borrowers.
The number of judges taking such action remains small, and most foreclosures go through without a challenge.
But the growing number of rulings against lenders’ claims is raising questions among some legal experts about judges’ impartiality.
“The question is whether judges are changing the rules in the middle of the game…just because there is a financial crisis,” says Todd Zywicki, a law professor at George Mason University and a critic of policy initiatives aimed at curtailing lenders’ ability to foreclose.
As early as 18 months ago, several judges in California, New York, Ohio and elsewhere would dismiss foreclosure cases if they could find reason to do so. But those judges often allowed the mortgage companies to refile their foreclosure claims after attesting to their ownership of the mortgage in the county in which the homeowner lives.
Now, after the country has been mired in a housing crisis for more than two years, more judges are calling these companies on their paperwork glitches, and in some cases going much further in their efforts to help homeowners. (Read more)
