Posts Tagged ‘law’

Two-Faced Freddie Mac, The Fiscal Cliff and the Obamacare Real Estate Tax, 2012’s Top Headlines Continued

Friday, December 28th, 2012

Happy New Year

Continuing our recap of our most popular blogs from 2012…

#5 — Robosigning Settlement Proves Sky Was Falling! Chicken Little Was Right!

Yesterday’s robosigning settlement that all but one state ultimately signed off on, was far from perfect.

Let’s make that perfectly clear.

Depending on what you have read, you might be outraged, you might be relieved, you might be overjoyed. And the target of your wrath or sympathy might depend on your own personal perspective.

But make no mistake about it, yesterday was a day of reckoning, for me, and much more importantly, for the people I represent.

Read the full post here.

#4 — What I Tell Clients Who Receive A Foreclosure Notice

As a real estate attorney, I’ve had plenty of prospective clients come to my office after being served with a foreclosure notice. It is safe to say they are usually not in a good mood; they are usually scared.

And the truth is I would be too.Foreclosure can be a scary process for even the most legally astute homeowner.

When a homeowner walks into my office for that first time, there is one question that comes up almost every time. It’s a basic yet very essential question to anyone under the threat of foreclosure…

What do I do next?

Read the full post here.

#3 — Freddie Mac — Playing Two-Face to the American Homeowner?

Aaron Eckhart might have played Two-Face in the last Batman movie, but Freddie Mac seems to have settled into the role these days.

Non-profit ProPublica and National Public Radio allege that Freddie Mac, which was set up to make home loans more accessible, was in fact betting against homeowners.
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Economic Homicide, the Mortgage Interest Deduction and the Rule of Law: 2012’s Top Headlines

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

Top 10Editor’s Note: As we head into 2013, I want to wish all of our readers a Happy New Year from everyone at Oppenheim Law. This has been our most successful year since the South Florida Law Blog was started in 2009. Our posts were seen by nearly 100,000 people, including our readers at Yahoo! Homes, where many of Roy Oppenheim’s blogs first appeared. For everyone who read or shared our content this year, a sincere thank you. Our mission is far from complete, and we look forward to sharing more commentary from the trenches in the New Year.

So without further adieu, here are the headlines that resonated with you over the past 12 months.

#10 — Obamacare, The Foreclosure Crisis and The Rule of Law

During the passing of the healthcare law, it seemed that the president assumed that the government had the ability to force people to buy a product from a private company that they did not necessarily want.

The mandate’s survival in the Supreme Court on a much narrower standard apparently leaves the question far from settled.

I felt that there was little, if any, constitutional analysis done by the president and his team when they decided to pass the mandate, except for the fact that they perceived a compelling need for it.

And that’s how the debate over the healthcare law reminded me of the legal debate during the foreclosure crisis.

Read the full blog here.

#9 — Mortgage Interest Deduction Will Be Capped, and That’s (Probably) a Good Thing

The fiscal cliff contains many, many moving parts, which sometimes tend to get lost in a sea of white noise. But behind all the political grandstanding and theatrics, there are real Main Street issues at play.
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Mortgage Settlement Payouts Are Another Blown Call

Monday, October 1st, 2012

Roy Oppenheim’s commentary was originally published on Yahoo! Homes and is being republished on South Florida Law Blog with their permission.

Green Bay Packers vs Seattle SeahawksWell the long national nightmare is over. No, not the fraudclosure crisis. Sad to say that legal mess is still being cleaned up years after the bubble burst.

I’m talking, of course, of the NFL referees lockout.

Believe it or not, as I watched the backpedaling by Goodell and Friends after the Monday Night debacle, I found an odd comparison with the latest installment of what I like to call “As the Mortgage Settlement Turns”.

Here in Florida, and in several other states across the country, thousands of homeowners are about to get notices in the mail, stating they too might be able to claim a piece of the settlement pie.

The basic premise is this, if you lost your home to foreclosure, you’ll get a claims form, if you fill it out and you’re deemed eligible, you could get some money for your troubles.

When you take a long hard look at this process, you’ll probably see, as I have, that this process is inherently flawed from the get-go.

It’s why I’m not assisting my clients fill out these forms. I am not getting involved.

So how does this relate back to the NFL? Well since the lockout started every statement that came from the League was a complete and utter whitewash of the problems caused by the use of the replacement referees.

Rather than apologizing or even acknowledging their mistake, a mistake millions of people saw with their own eyes, the NFL just stuck to a hollow narrative and hoped we’d just accept it and move on. Just as the government and the banks are trying to do now with this flimsy settlement.
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Drug Dealer or Florida Homeowner: Who Does Constitution Really Protect?

Monday, December 19th, 2011

The Oppenheim Law editorial team found this ironic: A drug dealer has more constitutional rights to protection from the government in his home than your average homeowner in foreclosure.

In a case being appealed to the United States Supreme Court, the Florida Supreme Court recently held that because the “home” has a long standing history of receiving additional constitutional protect

Interestingly enough, the U.S. government, through Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, is the single largest investor of residential mortgages. So what this really means is that the government can steal your house through bad loan paperwork and fraudulent foreclosure practices, but the local drug dealer is safe from a sniff by Franky the Drug Sniffing Dog.ions, using a drug sniffing dog outside the front door of a drug dealer’s house constituted an illegal search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment. Yet this same court has allowed banks and investors to use the lower courts in Florida as their own private collection agency.

This is yet one more example of the absurd turn that this country has taken during the real estate crash and subsequent foreclosure crisis, putting the government into the position of protecting the sanctity of a home owned by a drug dealer violating criminal laws, while stripping the same protections from one who is just down on his financial luck, in part due to the banks themselves.

The English belief that “every man’s house is his castle” formed the basis of the Fourth Amendment, and yet now has been convoluted to only protect criminals from prosecution, while leaving homeowners in foreclosure high and dry against a system that steamrolls their constitutional rights in the interest of protecting big banks, Wall Street, and now Uncle Sam.
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