Robo Signers Celebrate One Year Anniversary and Roy Oppenheim Looks for Foreclosure Off Ramp

This is the anniversary no one wants to celebrate.

“We’re hitting the one-year anniversary of the robo-signing crisis,” noted Roy Oppenheim, Florida foreclosure defense attorney. “The banks said it would take 60 days to fix. It didn’t take 60 days. It’s been over a year.”

A recent article in the Daily Business Review highlights October as the anniversary month when the home foreclosure mess became a certified nightmare. Around this time in 2010, the Office of the Comptroller of Currency and the Federal National Mortgage Association basically asked the people responsible for the mortgage mess to police themselves and conduct self-audits to make sure their paperwork was legal.

About a week later, Bank of America stopped their attempts at home foreclosures nationwide. Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan assured everyone things would be up and running within a few weeks. A year later, the foreclosure market is still stuck in financial gridlock with no exit ramps in sight.

The numbers don’t lie. In South Florida alone, foreclosure filings are off track by significant amounts (Miami-Dade 66%, Broward County 60%, Palm Beach County 50% to name a few). And it’s not because people are suddenly able to pay their mortgages again. It’s because the long delay has caused the process to be restarted in many cases resulting in even more problems developing.

“We’re seeing a lot of ‘start from scratch,'” Oppenheim said. “Servicer B needs an affidavit from Servicer A, but Servicer A is gone. So you have a problem; there is no solution.”