Archive for the ‘Foreclosure Defense’ Category
Friday, May 4th, 2012
- Banks make bad neighbors.
It’s been one of my mantras for years, and it’s a statement that is again reverberating across the country thanks to The Sun-Sentinel’s 3-part series “Bad Neighbor Banks”.
Thanks to the Sentinel, 60 Minutes, and the National Fair Housing Alliance, we are seeing the hard data that back up my assertion that banks, once they foreclose and take control of a property, just leave them to rot.
The grass no longer gets cut,the garbage accumulates, and before too long you end up with widespread blight not just in urban neighborhoods, but suburbia as well.
It’s the reason why I fight so hard to keep people in their homes. You and I are just better off when you have homeowners, vested in their houses and the neighborhoods they live in, keeping up their homes.
In the Sun-Sentinel’s series there is example after example of banks not doing even the most basic of maintenance. And their argument is usually, ‘It’s not our job’.
A bank has no investment in the neighborhoods you live in, beyond their own bottom line, and the banks have all but admitted it.
“The bank itself has no economic interest or ownership stake in the properties,” a spokesman for Deutsche Bank told the Sun-Sentinel.
So I ask you again, why would you ever want a bank as a neighbor?
The numbers don’t lie. The Sun-Sentinel found 10,300 code violations in bank-owned homes in South Florida since 2007. In the cities they tracked 40 percent of bank-owned homes were cited last year.
So chances are you are living next to one of these eyesores. And I’m betting you’re not too happy about it.
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Tags: bad neighbors, bank, bank owned homes, banking, Deutsche Bank, florida governor, foreclosure, neighbor, neighbors, Pam Bondi, Real Estate, Rick Scott, rotten, sentinel, slumlord, slums, South Florida, Sun Sentinel, suns, urban decay
Posted in Big Banks, Florida foreclosures, Foreclosure Defense | 3 Comments »
Wednesday, April 25th, 2012
What would he have said about the banks fraudulent acts?
Last weekend Chuck Coulson, the man once called Richard Nixon’s ‘hatchet man”, passed away at the age of 80.
Known both for his being one of the ‘Watergate Seven’ and his subsequent 2nd life as a born-again evangelist, I can only wonder what he thought of of our current foreclosure crisis.
I don’t know if he ever gave it much thought, but I suspect there would be a level of amazement.
Watergate, which started over a single break-in, landed almost 50 men in jail, including many top Nixon aides like Coulson.
The banks have broken into thousands of homes in their efforts to secure ‘abandoned properties’. Except you and I both know that most of these homes were anything but abandoned.
Sometimes they weren’t even in foreclosure. I’ve had about a dozen clients who’ve had their locks changed or had their homes ransacked by repo agents who were hired by the banks.
The banks, playing the role of Nixon and his cronies, have used aggressive tactics that Coulson, in his days as Nixon’s legal counsel, might have employed.
Coulson allegedly said he would walk over his own grandmother to get the president re-elected, which sounds appropriate because banks have done almost everything else in order to foreclose on homeowners who often didn’t deserve it.
Yet for crimes that would seem to fit in any file on Watergate, there is not a single banking executive who has been arrested.
I’ll bet good money Coulson would wonder why.
Coulson was convicted for his efforts in trying to discredit the man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, but what would he have said about the ‘hatchet job’ banks have done on homeowners?
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Tags: 20th century in the united states, banking, banks, chuck coulson, conspiracy, coulson, foreclosure, foreclosures, hatchet job, hatchet man, homeowners, oppenheim, politics, presidency of richard nixon, richard, richard nixon, watergate, watergate scandal
Posted in Florida Law News, Foreclosure Defense | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 3rd, 2012
Man I just love it when the banks eat their own!
It’s even better when they start using MY arguments to do it. The very same arguments I’ve used to defend my clients.
The essential problem is this, securitized trusts, the ones your homes were bought and sold into, weren’t always mortgage-backed!
I’ve long had questions about the validity of these REMICs, and now the banks are making my case for me! Thanks guys!
HSH Nordbank AG is now suing Barclays N.Y. after they bought $46 million in residential mortgage-backed securities from them.
Investigators for HSH Nordbank claim that none of the 2,000 mortgage loans they sampled had actually been assigned into the trusts when they were sold.
So if they tried to foreclose on some of these properties, it made it very difficult for them to do so, the lawsuit alleges.
Had they realized the mortgages weren’t properly assigned, they never would have bought the securities in the first place, HSH Nordbank’s lawyers say.
As I’ve always said, it goes back to making the banks prove who owns your mortgage. HSH Nordbank basically is admitting that they couldn’t do exactly that! Now this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon.
I blogged about a similar lawsuit involving AIG and Bank of America last year. But the banks, it seems have, clearly have not learned their lesson.
According to the lawsuit, Barclays overstated the value of these loans in order to sell them off. It’s being alleged that these loans did not meet the underwriting standards of the mortgage securities that HSH Nordbank was buying into.
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Tags: bank, banking, banks, barclays, eric schneiderman, finance, fixed income securities, german banks, hsh nordbank, hsh nordbank ag, mortgage, mortgage backed security, mortgage loan, mortgage loans, mortgage security, mortgage-backed securities, mortgages, REMICS, residential mortgage backed security, rmbs working group, securities, securitization, structured finance
Posted in Eric Schneiderman, Foreclosure Defense, REMICS, Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities Working Group, Securitized Trusts | No Comments »
Saturday, March 31st, 2012
Bill extends Mortgage Debt Relief Act of 2007
I warned you earlier this month that if you’re considering a short sale, the time to get the ball rolling is now.
That’s because the Mortgage Debt Relief Act, which was passed in 2007, is set to expire at the end of this year. If that happens you’ll have to pay taxes on any forgiven debt that comes out of a short sale.
I remain skeptical that Congress, in this election year, will come through and extend the MDRA, but at least some Congressmen haven’t forgotten how important this legislation is. Then again, in an election year anything is possible.
U.S. Reps. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., and John Larson, D-Conn., have introduced the Homeowners Tax Fairness Act. It would extend the Mortgage Debt Relief Act for another three years.
Let’s hope Congress gets their act together and passes this bill.
NY Foreclosure Case Could Be A Game Changer
It remains to be seen if a foreclosure dismissal will have an impact here in Florida, but none the less it has the chance to be a real game changer.
The case is OneWest Bank, FSC vs Galli. OneWest had tried for a partial summary judgement against the Gallis, but the judge in the case denied it and instead ruled in favor of Mr. and Mrs. Galli.
As I’ve always said, you have to make the banks prove they own the note, but in reality it’s more than that. I could pick up a note off the street and say I owned it, but it wouldn’t necessarily be true.
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Tags: consumer fraud, crisis, debt, debt relief, economics, extended mortgage, foreclosure, foreclosures, MERS, mortgage, mortgage debt, mortgage debt relief, mortgage insurance, mortgage relief, mortgages, ny, ny foreclosures, personal finance, quilt, quilts, Real Estate, relief, short sale, subprime mortgage crisis
Posted in Florida Law News, Foreclosure Defense, Friday RoundUp, MERS, Short Sales | No Comments »
Friday, February 24th, 2012
Photo by The-Lane-Team
Banks need to get their massive foreclosure backlog off the books. There are over 368,000 cases in Florida. I get that.
Getting these properties into the hands of families who can afford them, that is what I want to see. It’s needed to jump start the economy, and no one wants to see the banks out of the neighborhoods more than me.
But it can’t be allowed to happen on the backs of other homeowners plain and simple. Lenders have tried to thrust these homes back onto the market before, and that’s why they just shelled out $25 billion.
The banks were penalized for being unethical, untrustworthy and fraudsters, and it doesn’t look like they have learned their lesson.
Yet a series of proposed bills now making their way through the Florida House and Senate offer banks unjust control over the foreclosure process, all in the name of getting abandoned homes back on the market.
The Senate version, which would create the “Florida Fair Foreclosure Act”, was passed by a judiciary committee earlier this week by a 5-2 vote. There is a similar bill making their way through the House.
But are they really ‘fair’ to homeowners? Absolutely not.
These bills are being pushed by banking industry shills. They make it easier for lenders to foreclose, and allows them to do so faster.
Have the politicians in Tallahassee learned nothing from the settlement? The $25 billion isn’t even in the mail, yet some are back to their old tricks, turning a blind eye to the plights of their constituents and denying them due process.
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Tags: abandoned, abandoned homes, acting, banks, deficiency, deficiency judgment, Florida, Florida fair, Florida Fair Foreclosure Act, Florida foreclosure law, Florida House, florida houses, Florida Senate, foreclosure, foreclosure process, foreclosures, homeowners, house, mortgage, Oppenheim Law, personal finance, politicians, property, Real Estate, real property law, Roy Oppenheim, senate
Posted in Florida Fair Foreclosure Act, Florida foreclosures, Florida Law News, Foreclosure Defense, Foreclosure Fraud | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012
Humpty Dumpty has had his great fall, thanks to an outstanding bankruptcy judge who has all but dismantled the Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) thanks to his recent ruling.
Last week New York Judge Robert Grossman ruled that all of MERS’ business practices are illegal.
It’s a staggering blow to the banks and their endless efforts to circumvent due process. It has the potential to once again slow down the foreclosure process.
The foreclosure registry was set up by the banks with one purpose in mind, to make securitizing mortgages easier for them.
And homeowners, as is usually the case with matters relating to bundled mortgages, were getting screwed.
Here’s the short explanation. MERS allowed the banks to bypass public record keeping, all in an effort to streamline the records that banks were using to foreclose.
Local record keeping regulations might have been cumbersome for the banks to keep up with, but it protected the homeowners and provided transparency.
By allowing the banks to essentially hijack an important part of the record keeping process, namely the recording of each time a mortgage was sold to a different investor, banks had much greater control then than they ever should have been allowed to.
Banks can talk about streamlining the process as the reason behind MERS all they want, but the effect was that it was much more difficult for homeowners to see who currently owned their mortgage, and it just allowed the banks to be sloppy with their records, and they were.
MERS was separating the notes from the mortgages, again so they could be securitized, yet in the case that was brought before Grossman, their lawyers argued they could still foreclose because in theory, the mortgage follows the note.
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Tags: bankruptcy, bankruptcy judge, foreclosure, humpty dumpty, MERS, mortgage, Mortgage Electronic Registration System, note, record keeping, REMIC, REMICS, Robert Grossman
Posted in Foreclosure Defense, Foreclosure Fraud, MERS, REMICS | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
If there was anything positive that came out of the prolonged discussions between the states and the banks on the mortgage servicing settlement, it was that banks were reluctant to go full steam ahead in the foreclosure process while talks were ongoing.
But even before the settlement was announced, we saw signs that pointed to more foreclosures in 2012.
According to RealtyTrac, there were 24,783 foreclosure filings in the state of Florida in January, a 14% percent rise from January 2011, the first year-over-year increase in over a year.
Now that the settlement has been agreed to, the training wheels are off.
It’s petal to the metal folks. One thing that the settlement does for the banks is provide them a blueprint for how to proceed in the foreclosure process without getting their fingers stuck in the cookie jar.
Which means borrowers will once again have to defend themselves just as rigorously as they did pre-robosigning.
I’ve been asked if the settlement changes my advice to homeowners, to which I reply, ABSOLUTELY NOT!
You must continue to stand your ground. If you are in foreclosure or about to enter foreclosure, I will say what I have always said, you must fight the banks and force them to kick you out of your home.
The settlement may have changed the rules for the banks, but it shouldn’t change the rules for you, the homeowner. The banks will not transform into wonderful and charitable companies just because the settlement might penalize them.
Make no mistake about it, they will continue to come at you and come at your hard.
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Tags: banking, economics, foreclosure, foreclosure process, foreclosures, homeowners, Loan Modification, loss mitigation, mortgage, mortgage services, mortgage settlement, mortgages, Oppenheim Law, personal finance, Real Estate, real property law, realty trac, robosigning, Roy Oppenheim, settlement, short sale, stand your ground, subprime mortgage crisis
Posted in Bank Fraud, Foreclosure Defense, Mortgage Settlement, Principal Reduction, Robosigning, Roy Oppenheim, Underwater Mortgage | 1 Comment »
