South Florida Law Blog

In my last blog I railed against the Florida Fair Foreclosure Act, which is making its way rapidly through the Florida Senate as the session winds down. I said it’s being pushed by banking industry shills and should die a quick death. So of course it was passed by the Senate Banking and Insurance Committee by a 6-4 vote and […]

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 […]

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 […]

There were two players conspicuously absent when last week’s $25 Billion settlement was unveiled; two players that absolutely should have been front and center. What are their names? If you’ve followed the housing crisis as closely as we have, then you probably know. Our old and unwanted cousins Fannie and Freddie. Their omission from the settlement was perhaps its biggest […]

For 5 years now we’ve been a huge champion of the short sale. We’ve been banging and banging away at the banks because they didn’t share our opinion. There has long been an institutional reluctance among our nation’s lenders to embrace the short sale, but it appears they are finally coming around. According to Corelogic’s most recent numbers, short sales […]

The clock may have run out on this year’s Super Bowl (Way to go Giants!!) but there’s still a few minutes left in this year’s REAL grudge match, the Banks vs. the Attorney Generals. It’s 4th and Inches, the score is tied, and it would be nice to avoid overtime. Today we could learn whether the much-discussed robo-signing settlement with […]

President Obama is likely to talk about this in tonight’s State of The Union Address, but we’re not going to wait that long. With details of the proposed $25 billion settlement with the nation’s largest banks over the robo-signing fiasco now out in the public eye thanks to the Associated Press, we feel a large sense of disappointment. There’s no […]

Finally!!!It’s a word that is being bantered about the hallways of Oppenheim Law all too often these days, and thanks to the Fed’s recent comments on the foreclosure crisis, it’s been thrown around at rapid-fire pace these last few days. Through a 26-page white paper which highlighted the “extraordinary problems plaguing the housing market”, officials at the Federal Reserve have […]