MIAMI (CBS4) Two people have been arrested after they reportedly interfered with three evictions from a foreclosed Liberty City low income apartment complex.
The apartment buildings at 8th Avenue and NW 70th Street were foreclosed on late last year by JP Morgan-Chase.
Some residents told CBS4 they made their rent payments to the “landlord” when he came to their door once a month, but their payments never made it to the bank.
The tenants now face eviction because JP Morgan-Chase does not want to renew the leases and upkeep the buildings. Already emptied units have been boarded up.
The apartment buildings have been turned over to ECP Properties of Texas, a subsidiary of JP Morgan-Chase, which specializes in “toxic” foreclosure assets.
On Tuesday police evicted tenants from apartments 3 and 4 in the 830 building and a third tenant in the next apartment building over.
“During a housing crisis, we cannot afford to kick people out of low income housing and board up more vacant living spaces,” said Rameau. “JP Morgan-Chase received a $25 billion bailout while poor people get eviction notices. Therefore, we are engaging in civil disobedience because the laws which allow banks to get bailouts and keep homes vacant while families face homelessness are immoral.”
One of the residents and Rameau were arrested when they offered resistance to the evictions.
LISTENING TO CASSANDRA: THE DIFFICULTY OF RECOGNIZING RISKS AND TAKING ACTION
Carol A. Needham* FORDHAM LAW REVIEW
Presumably,
courts will arrive at a consensus regarding whether to permit foreclosures when the entity seeking to foreclose is either an investor holding only one slice of a loan (rather than the entire obligation) or a nonlending servicing representative, such as Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS), which is a nominee for the lender and its successors in interest but has no lending relationship with the borrower.5
more than just assignment of the deed alone; the note must also be assigned. . . . MERS
purportedly assigned both the deed of trust and the promissory note . . . . However, there is no evidence of record that establishes that MERS either held the promissory note or was given the authority . . . to assign the note.” (citations omitted)); In re Vargas, 396 B.R. 511, 517 (Bankr. C.D. Cal. 2008) (“MERS presents no evidence as to who owns the note, or of any authorization to act on behalf of the present owner.”); Landmark Nat’l Bank v. Kesler, 216 P.3d 158, 166 (Kan. 2009).
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) – In another sign of the firms’ financial disintegration, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage finance companies operating in government conservatorship, said Wednesday they are delisting their common and preferred stocks from the New York Stock Exchange.
Freddie /quotes/comstock/13*!fre/quotes/nls/fre (FRE1.22, +0.02, +1.67%) said in a press release that, “this notice was made pursuant to a directive by the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Freddie Mac’s conservator, requiring Freddie Mac to delist its common and preferred securities from the NYSE.”
According to a press release by FHFA, the agency issued similar directives to both Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (FNM0.92, +0.01, +1.14%) .
Freddie said it expects its shares to trade in the over-the-counter bulletin board market after the delisting. The delisting should occur around July 8, the firm said.
Shortly after Freddie’s announcement, Fannie Mae said that it too is delisting its common and preferred shares from the New York Stock Exchange and the Chicago Stock Exchange after being told to take the move by its regulator.
The U.S. government established Fannie Mae in 1938 to make mortgages more available to low income families. In 1979, the government created Freddie Mac, to expand the market for mortgages in the country.
Both firms were put into government conservatorship in August 2008, after the U.S. housing market collapsed, triggering the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
Greg Morcroft is MarketWatch’s financial editor in New York.
I’m not quite certain how to calibrate journalism American Banker style, but I found this article, “Challenges to Foreclosure Docs Reach a Fever Pitch,” (sadly, subscription only, e-mailed by Chris Whalen), to be both interesting and more than a tad disingenuous.
The spin starts with the headline, it’s a doozy. The “challenge to foreclosure documents” message persists throughout the article, and it’s perilously close to a misrepresentation:
Because the notes were often sold and resold during the boom years, many financial companies lost track of the documents. Now, legal officials are accusing companies of forging the documents needed to reclaim the properties.
On Monday, the Florida Attorney General’s Office said it was investigating the use of “bogus assignment” documents by Lender Processing Services Inc. and its former parent, Fidelity National Financial Inc. And last week a federal judge in Florida ordered a hearing to determine whether M&T Bank Corp. should be charged with fraud after it changed the assignment of a mortgage note for one borrower three separate times…
In many cases, [plaintiff attorney] Kowalski said, it has become impossible to establish when a mortgage was sold, and to whom, so the servicers are trying to recreate the paperwork, right down to the stamps that financial companies use to verify when a note has changed hands…
In a notice on its website, the Florida attorney general said it is examining whether Docx, an Alpharetta, Ga., unit of Lender Processing Services, forged documents so foreclosures could be processed more quickly.
“These documents are used in court cases as ‘real’ documents of assignment and presented to the court as so, when it actually appears that they are fabricated in order to meet the demands of the institution that does not, in fact, have the necessary documentation to foreclose according to law,” the notice said..
Yves here. Let’s parse the two messages:
1. Note how the problem is presented as one of “documentation”, implying it is not substantive.
2. Because everyone knows mortgages were sold a lot, (which is clearly mentioned in the piece) the idea that some somehow went missing (or as the piece suggests, the “documentation” is missing even though the parties are presented as if they know who really owns the mortgage) is presented as something routine and not very alarming.
OK, let’s dig a little deeper. Even though the media refers to “mortgages”, under the law there are two pieces: the note, which is the indebtedness, and the mortgage (in some states, a “deed of trust”), which is the lien against the property. In 45 of 50 states, the mortgage follows the note (it is an “accessory”) and has no independent existence (as in you can’t enforce the mortgage if you don’t hold the note. You need to have both the note and the mortgage. This is a bit approximate, but will do for this discussion).
Now, the note is a bearer instrument if it is endorsed in blank (as in signed by current owner but not specifically made payable to the next owner, which was common for notes that were sold). It isn’t some damned “documentation”. Remember the days of bonds, when you had the real security, or stock certificates? This is paper with a hard monetary value, the face amount of the note (as long as it’s current, anyhow).
So now go back and look at that little extract. This “oh business was so busy we mislaid a lot of paper” isn’t some mere filing error. It’s like saying you left an envelopes full of cash in the subway on a regular basis. In the late 1960s back office crisis on Wall Street, when the volume of stock trading overwhelmed delivery and settlement infrastructure, a LOT of firms went out of business, in the midst of a bull market.
OK, now the second item with the article finesses is the sale of mortgages versus the role of the servicer. For the overwhelming majority of first mortgages, and I believe about 50% of second mortgages and HELOCs, the servicer is working for a trust that holds the notes pursuant to a securitization.
The standard documentation for a RMBS calls for the trust to gave a certification at closing that it has all the notes and it has to recertify that it has all the assets at two additional future dates, usually 90 days out and a full year after closing.
So this “notes were flyin’ around, yeah we lost track” is presumably impossible if we are discussing securitizations. Or put it another way: it means the fraud here is much more extensive than servicers making up documents ex post facto. It means the fraud extended back into how the securitization took place (as in what investors were told v. what actually happened).
And before you say these reports are exaggerated, my limited sample and my discussions with mortgage professional (not merely plaitiff’s attorneys but mortgage industry lifers) suggests the reverse.
But what about the second claim in the headline, that this activity has reached a “fever pitch”? Wellie, that’s a distortion too, perhaps to energize those who would be enraged by visions of deadbeat borrowers staying in houses due to fancy legal footwork. Trust me, there are FAR more overextended borrowers living in “free” housing due to banks slowing up the foreclosure process than due to legal battles.
First, the story is ONLY about Florida, despite the hyperventilating tone. And Florida is way ahead of other jurisdictions. There is a group of lawyers that are sharing G2 on these cases, and there are also a fair number of sympathetic judges. Note some states (Minnesota in particular) have both extremely pro bank laws and a business friendly bar. So it’s misleading to make sweeping generalizations; you need to get a bit more granular, which this article fails to do.
Second, the “fever pitch” headline also conveys the impression that this is an epidemic, ergo, these cases are widespread. While it is hard to be certain (this activity is by nature fragmented), at this point, that looks to be quite an exaggeration. The vast majority of borrowers, when the foreclosure process moves forward, don’t fight. They lack the energy and the resources. And when the borrower prevails, the case is typically dismissed “without prejudice”, meaning if the servicer and trustee get their act together, they can come back to court and try again.
Most of the battles against foreclosure appear to fall into one of two categories:
1. The borrower can afford the mortgage, but has fallen behind due to what he thinks is a servicing snafu. I can give you the long form, but the way servicers charge extra fees is in violation of Federal law and is designed to put the borrower on a treadmill of escalating fees. And they do not typically inform the borrower that fees have compounded until 6 or more months into the mess, and by that time, the arrearage can be $2000 or more. The borrower is unable to fix the servicing error, the fees continue to escalate, and the house goes into foreclosure.
2. The borrower has filed for a Chapter 13 bankruptcy, but the trustee is fighting the bankruptcy stay and trying to seize the house.
So why this alarmist American Banker article? Even if the numbers of successfully contested foreclosures are not (yet) large, the precedents being set are very detrimental to the foreclosure mills, the servicers, and the trustees. Moreover, the costs of fighting these cases can quickly exceed the value of the mortgage. So it would not take much of an increase in this trend to wreak havoc with servicer economics, and ultimately, the losses on the trust, particularly on prime mortgages, where the loss cushions were considerably smaller than on subprime.
I suspect the real reason for alarm isn’t the “fever pitch,” meaning the current level of activity. It’s that a state attorney general is throwing his weight against the servicers, and what he is uncovering is every bit as bad as what the critics have been saying for some time. That may indeed kick up anti-foreclosure efforts in states with open-minded judges to a completely new level.
