Archive for July, 2011

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VIDEO: How to Avoid Deficiency Judgments by Roy Oppenheim

Monday, July 18th, 2011

Attorney Roy Oppenheim’s Summer School is in session with a special focus on Florida foreclosure defense strategies including today’s topic: How to avoid a Florida Deficiency Judgement. Oppenheim Law wants to help “bullet-proof” Florida homeowners against the banks; helping them understand the difference between a deficiency and a deficiency judgement.

A deficiency is when the bank forecloses on your house and a difference of money you owe remains. Once such a deficiency is registered by a court, it becomes a deficiency judgment.

In Florida, if you have a deficiency and it becomes a deficiency judgement, the Florida bank can seize your assets (bank accounts, cars, estate, etc.) for up to 20 years.

In this Summer School ‘How To’ Video, Roy Oppenheim tells you what you need to know about deficiency and deficiency judgements in less than four minutes!

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Posted in Deficiency Judgements, Florida Law News | 4 Comments »

Principal Reduction: Why Banks Don’t Do It More + What’s Wrong With It

Saturday, July 16th, 2011

There are quite a few people who advocate principal reduction as the best way to get out of the housing crisis. Their arguments were succinctly laid out and analyzed in an Atlanta Federal Reserve white paper.

Advocates of such a policy argue that it would be cheaper for banks to reduce the principal of a loan to the current value of a house because people who have positive equity in their homes are much less likely to default on their loans. The policy would also help homeowners because they would get to stay in their homes. It seems like a win-win situation, except it isn’t.

As a recent New York Times article illustrates the difficulty with large scale restructuring programs is that banks don’t know who really needs the help and who is trying to take advantage of the situation.

Ms. Rula Giosmas was not one of the people who needed help, yet she got it anyway. For her lender, the modification amounts to an avoidable loss. The lack of knowledge in who can pay and who can’t is the reason why banks are wary of initiating large scale modification programs: not all underwater borrowers will default on their mortgages.

It still remains economically advantageous to foreclose on the defaulters and continue to collect the full loan amounts from the people who can and will pay. The banks also worry that if they do initiate large scale modification programs, it will encourage people who can pay to miss payments simply to qualify for the principal reduction. Such a problem is called moral hazard, where there are incentives to perform badly. The last thing that banks want is to encourage people to default.
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Posted in Florida Law News, Loan Modification | 2 Comments »

Beware of Zombie Foreclosures! Cases Dismissed Months Ago are Now Back from the Dead

Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

It’s a case of Dawn of the Dead called zombie foreclosures. In addition to the wave of Florida foreclosure cases expected once the banks get their paperwork in order and begin to foreclose on new homes again, a different wave of foreclosure cases is also ready to crest. The second wave is the zombie foreclosure wave.

The zombie cases are the ones that were dismissed without prejudice, meaning that they can be re-filed; because lawyers for the banks didn’t show up to hearings or the cases were dismissed due to legal and technical irregularities. Typically, such cases were handled by large foreclosure mills that had sloppy practices.

Now banks are getting a second shot at the cases, which will further clog the court system with even more cases. However, the backlog in the courts and the long periods of inactivity in the zombie cases does buy homeowners more time.

The future surge of cases also creates the danger that the “cookie-cutter” approach lambasted by Judge Jennifer Bailey, the head of the Miami-Dade civil court division, will once again be used by lawyers overwhelmed by the sheer number of cases to deal with. The problem is that the cookie-cutter approach was what allowed the banks and mortgage servicers to fraudulently foreclose on homeowners in the first place.

There is the potential, with the anticipated surge in foreclosure cases, for further fraud and abuse.

The irony is it could be happening with the exact same foreclosure cases that the document mills mishandled in the first place!

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Posted in Florida foreclosures | 8 Comments »

Hooray for Sheila Bair, a Regulator Who Stood Up for the Little Guy

Tuesday, July 12th, 2011

Three cheers for Sheila Bair, the former head of the FDIC and a true advocate for the little guy, who resigned this week on July 8th. She fought for what is right for the homeowner, the depositor and the taxpayer.

Shelia was probably the only person in the Obama administration who really “got it.”

As a financial regulator, she understood the crisis as we do at Oppenheim Law, on the ground and in the trenches.

Truly the champion of the little guy, Sheila really understood that there were two sets of rules in this country:one set for big banks and another set for everyone else.

Her opinion was always dismissed and considered inferior to that of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve. She knew that the Obama Administration, while maybe understanding the plight of the little guy, always capitulated to the interests of big business, Wall Street and the banks.

Sheila understood that from Day One her responsibility was to protect the consumer, the depositor, the homeowner, and most importantly, the taxpayer. In a major piece written in the New York Times magazine this past weekend, she questioned why investment banks that were “counterparties” to AIG, like Goldman Sachs, received 100 cents on the dollar from the AIG bailout. Goldman, in fact, received over $12 billion from the bailout. As is well known, many people in the administration were in fact in some way connected to Goldman.

Before the crisis had truly descended upon our nation in 2007, Sheila understood that if banks were required to modify mortgages there was a possibility that the foreclosure crisis which led to the meltdown of the real estate market and subsequent destruction of the economy could possibly be contained.
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Posted in Florida foreclosures, Florida Law News, From The Trenches, Loan Modification, Roy Oppenheim | 2 Comments »

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