Good points to learn.

Scribd

In the Matter of the Foreclosure of Tax Liens by Proceeding In Rem Pursuant to Article 11 of the Real Property Tax Law by the County of Wayne Regarding 2007 Town/County Tax.

MERS claims that the proceedings and ensuing conveyances of 4664 Smith Road were defective, because MERS was not separately noticed. There are at least two difficulties with this claim. First, the argument assumes that the County has a duty to read the Mortgage to determine whether anyone else other than the Mortgagee had a cognizable property interest warranting statutory notice under RPTL §1125. This Court does not believe this is or should be the case. The County should not have to go behind a title search to determine whether any property interests are conveyed to third parties not a party to an instrument on file. To accept MERS’ argument would require the County to read every mortgage from A to Z to make sure there are no “Nominees” of the Lender entitled to notice of tax foreclosure in lieu of or in addition to the Lender. Indeed, RPTL §1126(A) provides a vehicle for someone like MERS to receive notice without requiring the County to read every mortgage to determine whether notice should be given.

Second, the Mortgage from which MERS derives its claim of right to statutory notice under RPTL §1125 is by no means crystal clear as to what MERS’ involvement as `’Nominee” requires after the recording of the mortgage. Indeed. MERS does not explain what role the “Nominee” plays in the recording of a mortgage, or thereafter, except perhaps as something akin to a power-ofattorney or agent, albeit with independent standing. If the later is the case, it is incumbent upon the “”Nominee” to state its status as one due notice in the separate declaration of interest form required under section RPTL § 1126, which the County does have a categorical duty to read.

According, the application of MERS shall be, and the same hereby is, denied.

Scribd

Updated 1:49 PM EDT, Tue, May 4, 2010

AP

The man accused in the car bomb scare in New York over the weekend defaulted on a $200,000 mortgage on his Shelton home and the property is in foreclosure, court records show.

The Associated Press has obtained records that show that Chase Home Finance LLC sued Faisal Shahzad in September to foreclose on the home.

On Tuesday morning, authorities were at the two-story grayish-brown Colonial, which looked as if it had been unoccupied for a while, with grass growing in the driveway and bags of garbage lying about.

The foreclosure records show Shahzad took out the mortgage on the property in 2004, and he co-owned the home with a woman named Huma Mian.

Nice PR move….NOT!

Bob Self/The Times-Union

Florida Governor Charlie Crist waves to employees at LPS while being introduced by Jeff Carbiener, the CEO of LPS during a visit to the business Wednesday afternoon. Crist made a stop at Lender Processing Services, Inc. on Riverside Avenue Wednesday afternoon as one of several stops in Jacksonville on the theme of jobs.

© 2010-12 FORECLOSURE FRAUD | by DinSFLA. All rights reserved.
www.StopForeclosureFraud.com

Extra Special Delivery…via Brian W. Davies

[scribd id=30939283 key=key-24i05tjgw2t94w9n8nye mode=list]

In the past few days CORPORATIONS involved in Assignment of Mortgage Fraud may have asked search engines nicely to keep recent news or discoveries associated with bloggers who may have been affected by this “fraud” from hitting GOOGLE, BING, YAHOO, TWITTER and the likes. NOT FOR LONG!

The damage has been caused and I can tell you from last months hits…THE WHOLE WORLD knows and ARE WATCHING!

We installed a clustrmap on the right a few days ago so we can keep track!

RELATED STORY: OPERATION “DARK CLOUD”

Last November, Michael Hill of Lexington, S.C., finally got the call he’d been waiting for. Congratulations, a rep from JPMorgan Chase told him, your trial mortgage modification is approved. Hill’s monthly payment, around $900, would be nearly halved. Except there was a problem. Chase had foreclosed on Hill’s home a month earlier, and his family was just days away from eviction.

“I listened to her and then I just said, ‘Well, that sounds good,’ ” Hill recalled. ” ‘Tell me how we’re going to do this, seeing as how you sold the house?’ ” That, he found out, was news to Chase.

 CHARTS: Tracking the U.S. housing market’s rise, fall and rebound

Millions of homeowners face losing their homes in the continuing foreclosure crisis, but homeowners often have more than the struggling economy and slumping house prices to worry about: Disorganization within the big banks that service mortgages has made a bad problem worse.

Hill was able to avoid eviction — for now. Chase reversed the sale by paying the man who’d bought the home an extra $19,500 on top of the $86,000 he’d paid at the auction. But other homeowners say they lost their homes because the communication breakdown within the banks was so complete that it led to premature or mistaken foreclosures.

“We believe in many cases people are losing their homes when they should not have,” said Kevin Stein, associate director of the California Reinvestment Coalition, which counts dozens of non-profits that work with homeowners among its members.

In the worst breakdowns, such as Hill’s, banks — and other companies that service loans — actually work at cross-purposes, with one arm of the company foreclosing on the home while the other offers help. Servicers say such mistakes are rare and result from the high volume of defaults and foreclosures.

The problems happen even among servicers participating in the administration’s $75 billion foreclosure-prevention program. Servicers operating under the year-old program are forbidden from auctioning someone’s home while a modification decision is pending.

It happens anyway.

Consumer advocates say the lapses continue because they go unpunished. “We’ve had too much of the carrot, and we need a stick,” Stein says. The Treasury Department has yet to penalize a servicer for breaking the program’s rules. The program provides federal subsidies to encourage modifications.

Treasury officials overseeing the program say they’re aware of the problems and have moved to fix them. Some states are going further to protect homeowners, however, with recent rules that stop the foreclosure process if the homeowner requests a modification.

Many homeowners, seeing no other option, have gone to court to reclaim their homes. At least 50 homeowners have recently filed lawsuits alleging the servicer foreclosed with a loan mod request pending or even while they were on a payment plan.

 Long waits for help

 In good times, banks and other servicers —Bank of America is the biggest, followed by Chase and Wells Fargo— were known mainly to homeowners simply as where they sent their monthly mortgage payment. But the companies have been deluged over the past couple years by requests for help from millions of struggling homeowners.

 Homeowners commonly wait six months for an answer on a loan mod application. The federal program for encouraging loan mods includes a three-month trial period, after which servicers are supposed to decide whether to make the modifications permanent. But some homeowners have waited as long as 10 months for a final answer.

The experience of Hill, married with two children, typifies the delays and confusion. After the mistaken foreclosure, he began the trial modification last December. He made those payments, but two months after his trial period was supposed to end, Hill is still waiting for a final answer from Chase.

The miscommunications have continued. He received a letter in January saying that he’d been approved for a permanent modification, but he was then told he’d received it in error.

His family remains partially packed, ready to move should the modification not go through. “I’m on pins and needles every time someone’s knocking on the door or calling,” he said.

Christine Holevas, a Chase spokeswoman, said that Chase had “agreed with Hill’s request to rescind the foreclosure” and was “now reviewing his loan for permanent modification.” She said Chase services “more than 10 million mortgages — the vast majority without a hitch.”

Communication breakdowns occur because of the way the servicers are structured. One division typically deals with modifications and another with foreclosures. Servicers also hire a local trustee or attorney to actually pursue foreclosure.

 ”Often they just simply don’t communicate with each other,” said Laurie Maggiano, the Treasury official in charge of setting policy for the modification program. Such problems were particularly bad last summer, in the first few months of the program, she said. “Basically, you have the right hand at the mortgage company not knowing what the left hand is doing,” said Mark Pearce, North Carolina’s deputy commissioner of banks. Communication glitches and mistakes are “systemic, more than anecdotal” among mortgage servicers, he said.

 ”We’ve had cases where we’ve informed the mortgage company that they’re about to foreclose on someone.” The experience for the homeowner, he said, can be “Kafkaesque.”

 ”We’re all human, and the servicers are overworked and trying their best,” said Vicki Vidal, of the Mortgage Bankers Association. She said foreclosure errors are rare, particularly if struggling homeowners are prompt in contacting their servicer.

 Frances Gomez, of Tempe, Ariz., lived in her house for over 30 years. Three years ago, she refinanced it with Countrywide, now part of Bank of America, for nearly $300,000. The home’s value has declined dramatically, said Gomez, who put some of the money from the refinancing into her hair salon.

Last year, the recession forced her to close her shop. Gomez fell behind on her mortgage, and after striking out with a company that promised to work with Bank of America to get her a loan mod, she learned in December that her home was scheduled for foreclosure.

So Gomez applied herself. She twice succeeded in getting Bank of America to postpone the sale date, and she said she was assured it would not happen until her application was reviewed. Gomez had opened a smaller salon and understood there was a good chance she would qualify for a modification.

She was still waiting in March when a Realtor, representing the new owner of her home, showed up. Her house had sold at auction — for less than half of what Gomez owed. “They don’t give you an opportunity,” she said. “They just go and do it with no warning.”

It’s not supposed to work that way.

Under the federal program, which requires servicers to follow a set of guidelines for modifications, servicers must give borrowers a written denial before foreclosing. When Gomez called Bank of America about the sale, she said, she was told there was a mistake but nothing could be done. She did get a denial notice — some three weeks after the house was sold and just days before she was evicted.

“I just want people to know what they’re doing,” Gomez, now living with family members, said.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Bank of America reviewed Gomez’s case. Bank spokesman Rick Simon acknowledged that Gomez might not have been told her house would be sold and that the bank made a mistake in denying Gomez, because it did not take into account the income from her new salon business. Simon said a Bank of America representative would seek to negotiate with the new owner of Gomez’s house to see if the sale could be unwound.

Simon said the bank regrets when such mistakes happen due to the “very high volume” of cases and that any errors in Gomez’s case were “inadvertent.”

Even avoiding a mistaken sale can also be a stressful process.

One day in February, a man approached Ron Bermudez of Emeryville, Calif., in front of his house and told him his home would be sold in a few hours. This came as a shock to Bermudez; Bank of America had told him weeks earlier that he’d been approved for a trial modification and that the papers would soon arrive. He made a panicked phone call to an attorney, who was able to make sure there was no auction.

To contest a foreclosure under the federal program, Maggiano, the Treasury official, said a homeowner should call the HOPE Hotline, 888-995-HOPE, a Treasury Department-endorsed hotline staffed by housing counselors. Those counselors can escalate the case if the servicer still won’t correct the problem, she said.

That escalation process has saved “a number” of homeowners from being wrongfully booted out of their homes, Maggiano said. Hill, the South Carolina homeowner, is an example of someone helped by the HOPE Hotline.

Of course, the homeowner must know about the hotline to call it. Gomez, the Arizona homeowner who lost her home to foreclosure, said she’d never heard of it.

Many homeowner advocates say the government’s effort has been largely ineffective at resolving problems with servicers.

“I uniformly hear from attorneys and counseling advocates on the ground that the HOPE Hotline simply parrots back what the servicers have said,” said Alys Cohen, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center. Cohen said she’d voiced her concerns with Treasury officials, who indicated they’d make improvements.

Offering more protection

Under the current rules for the federal program, servicers have been barred from conducting a foreclosure sale if the homeowner requested a modification but are allowed to push along the process, even set a sale date. That allows them to foreclose more quickly if they determine the homeowner doesn’t qualify for a modification.

As a result, a homeowner might get a modification offer one day and a foreclosure notice the next. As of March, servicers were pursuing foreclosure on 1.8 million residences, according to LPS Applied Analytics.

Maggiano, the Treasury official, said that’s been confusing for homeowners. Some “just got discouraged and gave up.”

New rules issued by the Treasury in March say the servicer must first give the homeowner a shot at a modification before beginning the process that leads to foreclosure.

They also require the servicers to adopt new policies to prevent mishaps. For instance, the servicer will be required to provide a written certification to its attorney or trustee that the homeowner does not qualify for the federal program before the house can be sold.

Maggiano said the changes resulted from visits to the servicers’ offices last December that allowed Treasury officials to “much better understand (their) inner workings.”

The rules, however, don’t take effect until June. Nor do they apply to hundreds of thousands of homeowners seeking a modification for whom the process leading to foreclosure has already begun. And Treasury has yet to set any penalties for servicers who don’t follow the rules.

Maggiano said Treasury’s new rule struck a balance to help homeowners who were responsive to servicer communications to stay out of foreclosure while not introducing unnecessary delays for servicers. Some borrowers don’t respond at all to offers of help from the servicer until they’re faced with foreclosure, she said.

Some states, such as North Carolina, have recently gone further to delay moving toward foreclosure if a homeowner requests a modification. State regulators there recently passed a law that requires a servicer to halt the process if a homeowner requests a modification.

Pearce, the North Carolina official, said the rule was prompted by the delays homeowners have been facing and puts the burden on the servicer to expeditiously review the request. “They’re in total control.”

Stopping the process not only removes the possibility of a sudden foreclosure, he said, but also stops the accumulation of fees, which build up and can add thousands to the homeowner’s debt as the servicer moves toward foreclosure.

In California, state Sen. Mark Leno, a Democrat from San Francisco, is pushing a bill that would do something similar. The servicers “should be working a lot harder to keep homeowners in their home,” he said.

 Kiel is a reporter for ProPublica, an independent non-profit newsroom based in New York. USA TODAY editors worked with him in preparing this story for publication.

SHARE YOUR STORY Are you a homeowner seeking a loan modification through the government program?Click here to share your story with ProPublica.

	HELP FOR BORROWERS What should you do if you’re foreclosed on while you’re waiting for an answer on your loan modification application? Treasury officials say you should call the HOPE Hotline, 888-995-HOPE. It’s staffed by housing counselors, who will contact the servicer to try to resolve the situation. If the counselors can’t resolve the problem, they can bring the issue to a “solution center” staffed by Fannie Mae, with which Treasury contracted to administer the modification program. Those employees can intervene on behalf of the Treasury if the servicer is breaking the program’s rules, they said.

	HOW MICHAEL HILL ALMOST LOST HIS HOME A chronology of one borrower’s experience with a mistaken foreclosure.  Early 2009: After falling behind on his mortgage, Hill has many phone calls with JPMorgan Chase but is not offered a modification. April 2: Chase files to pursue foreclosure on Hill’s house. Aug. 6: Chase refers Hill to a housing counselor. With her help, he applies again for a modification. Oct. 5: Chase sells Hill’s home at a foreclosure auction for $86,000. Nov. 5: The sheriff issues Hill a notice saying he’ll be evicted in one week. Nov. 11: Chase calls to tell Hill that he’s been approved for a trial modification. Nov. 18: Chase buys the home back for $19,521 above the auction price. Dec. 9: Hill begins the trial modification. Source: ProPublica interviews with Michael Hill and Hill’s records.

	HOMEOWNER LOSES HOME More than 50 homeowners have filed lawsuits in the past year, alleging a communication breakdown led to foreclosure.In one of those suits, David Peterson of Grain Valley, Mo. says Chase Home Finance, part of JPMorgan Chase, assured him in December 2008,  that he qualified for a loan modification and would soon receive the papers in the mail. The offer was not under the government program, which didn’t launch until April 2009. When the papers had still not arrived a month later, he says he called to ask whether he should send in a payment. He was told to wait, the suit says, and was assured he would not be foreclosed on. Nevertheless, Chase sold his home. More than three weeks later, Peterson says he received the modification papers in the mail. They were dated one day after the foreclosure had occurred. Chase refused to reverse the sale, according to the suit, which was filed last month. Chase declined to comment on pending litigation. - By Paul Kiel, ProPublica