Source: The Bradenton Herald (Bradenton, Fla.)
Publication date: May 21, 2010
By Duane Marsteller, The Bradenton Herald, Fla.
May 21–MANATEE — Buyer interest in foreclosed homes is waning as a growing number of them are poised to hit the market, a combination that could spell trouble for the U.S. housing market’s recovery, according to survey results released Thursday.
Just 45 percent of those questioned said they would consider buying a foreclosure, down from 55 percent a year ago, according to a national online survey conducted for RealtyTrac and Trulia.com. The most common concerns cited: potential hidden costs, a risky, time-consuming process and fears the home will lose value after the purchase.
“It appears that potential homebuyers are taking a more realistic view of foreclosure purchasing,” said Rick Sharga, RealtyTrac’s senior vice president.
At the same time, lenders are repossessing U.S. homes at a record rate: 918,000 last year and another 258,000 in the first three months of 2010, according to RealtyTrac, a foreclosure listing service. Only about 30 percent of those properties are on the market.
The remaining “shadow inventory” has stoked fears that lenders will swamp the market with foreclosures, further depressing prices. But Sharga said lenders have been managing that inventory “in an orderly, measured manner” and are unlikely to suddenly open the spigot.
“We’re not going to see a flood,” he said during a conference call with reporters. “We’re going from a trickle to a steady stream.” DinSFLA: no-no we are going to see a TSUNAMI!
But both he and Pete Flint, Trulia.com’s co-founder and chief executive, said home prices likely won’t rise much in the next year as a result. That means the U.S. housing market won’t return to normal until 2013 and much later in harder-hit markets, including Sarasota-Bradenton.
The Manatee Association of Realtors’ president said she wasn’t surprised that interest in foreclosures has diminished, but she said it remains strong locally.
“A year ago, the market was just picking up and everybody wanted a deal,” said Cindy Greco, of Wagner Realty. “Now there’s a greater awareness that foreclosed properties aren’t a walk in the park … but they’re still attractive to investors and savvy buyers.”
She said sellers who aren’t facing foreclosure also have become more realistic in their asking prices, thus making foreclosed properties less appealing to buyers.
The survey also found that four in 10 homeowners would consider intentionally defaulting on their mortgages if their homes are “underwater,” or worth less than what’s owed on them.
It’s the first time the semi-annual survey, first conducted in May 2008, asked that question. But Flint said he suspects more will be willing to consider walking away as the stigma of foreclosure lessens.
Sharga said that willingness is higher in markets with a larger proportion of condominium units and ones that saw overbuilding, rapidly escalating prices and heavy speculation during the housing boom — all characteristics of the Sarasota-Bradenton market.
“I think there is a lot of visceral anger at the banks right now” on the part of homeowners, he said, especially those who feel banks are stonewalling their efforts to avoid foreclosure. “If lenders had the appearance of being more willing to work with homeowners, there would be fewer people willing to walk away.”
Harris Interactive questioned 2,956 U.S. adults aged 18 and older for the survey May 10-12.
Duane Marsteller, transportation/growth and development reporter, can be reached at 745-7080, ext. 2630.
—–
To see more of The Bradenton Herald or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.bradenton.com.
A Brooklyn judge has rejected a bank’s request for $9,112 in costs for producing subpoenaed documents, calling the claim an example of the excess and greed among “fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”
JPMorgan Chase, a non-party in an action to confirm an arbitration award, sought 25 cents per page and $25 per hour for producing 18,248 pages of subpoenaed documents demanded by the petitioner.
In a blistering 11-page decision, Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Arthur Schack granted JPMorgan Chase only $1,250.27, or about one-seventh of the amount the bank requested.
“Clearly, Chase’s arbitrary $25.00 per hour … fee for the unsubstantiated 182 hours of research by person or persons unknown only helps to unjustly enrich ‘a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,'” Justice Schack wrote in Matter of Arbitration of Klein v. Persaud, 8007/09. “This Court is not a collection vehicle to further enrich already rich bankers.”
Schack called the bank’s CEO, James S. Dimon, the “fattest cat” at JPMorgan Chase, citing Dimon’s compensation of nearly $20 million in 2008.
Petitioner Abraham Klein initiated the underlying action to confirm a multimillion-dollar arbitration award against Christine Persaud and Caring Home Care Agency.
In July, Schack asked non-party JPMorgan Chase to submit an affirmation regarding its production expenses.
The bank claimed it provided Klein 18,248 pages of documents and requested $9,112 — $4,550 for locating and retrieving the documents and $4,562 for printing them.
In opposing JPMorgan Chase’s request, Klein called the bank’s demand “flawed and disingenuous.” He argued that the bank sought to be “rewarded for ignoring court orders” and reimbursed for pages it never produced. Klein also claimed that JPMorgan Chase flooded his attorneys with “thousands” of documents they never requested.
JPMorgan Chase denied those allegations.
“Chase produced approximately 12,000 pages by [the] deadline set by the Court … The 12,000 pages are responsive to petitioner’s unequivocal and explicit demand for all documents for that account,” the bank contended in court papers. “Chase has also produced more than 6,000 pages of documents for the other four accounts listed in the June 12th subpoena.”
Schack sided with Klein.
First, the judge reduced the bank’s hourly fee from $25 to $6.55 — the minimum wage in Indiana, where the judge believed the work may have been done, at the time the documents were produced.
“[T]he Court … is guided by the principal that ‘[o]rdinarily, the retrieval and evaluation of documents should be done by the lowest-level person consistent with accurate and reliable identification of the material called for,'” Schack wrote.
The 182 hours worked by JPMorgan Chase employees therefore came to $1,192, not $4,562, the judge concluded.
In order to determine the compensation rate per page the bank copied, the judge “examined” the Web sites of “three major stationary suppliers” and determined that a case of Hammermill Copy Plus Paper, containing 10 reams (i.e., 5,000 sheets) lists for $44.99, or a little less than a penny per page.
Schack therefore awarded JPMorgan Chase one cent per page for paper, plus an additional two cents for “toner, copier maintenance and electricity.”
The judge also noted that of the 18,248 pages that JPMorgan Chase produced, the bank placed 16,317 pages online, as opposed to printing them. For those pages, the bank only deserved compensation for labor and not supplies, the judge wrote, calling the bank’s claim “disingenuous.”
At three cents per page for only 1,939 pages, instead of 25 cents per page for 18,248, the bank deserved $58.17, not $4,562, Schack concluded.
The judge ordered Klein to pay JPMorgan Chase a total of $1,250.27.
Michelle E. Tarson of Simmons, Jannace & Stagg represented Chase. The firm did not return calls for comment.
It’s been about nine months since several federal judges in Ohio issued the widely-read amir foreclosure dismissals that shined a light on sloppy paperwork done by companies that specialize in handling foreclosures.
Since then, the WSJ reports tonight, other judges across the country have caught on and are carefully scrutinizing mortgage documents filed as part of foreclosures and dismissing cases based on mistakes they’re finding, which borrowers might be able to exploit when facing foreclosure. (For another good read on judges and lawyers working to staunch foreclosure, click here for a recent NLJ story.)
Among the issues hitting snags among the judges, according to WSJ:
“Backdated” mortgage assignments: Assignments, documents that transfer ownership of the mortgage, are executed after the foreclosure process has begun but state that they are “effective as of” a date prior to the foreclosure action. Some judges are dismissing those cases, saying attempts to retroactively assign the mortgage aren’t valid.
Suspicious multiple hats: Employees for mortgage companies are signing affidavits stating they are employees of one company, but other mortgage documents say they work at another firm. In some cases, an employee claims to work for companies on both sides of a transaction, prompting one skeptical judge to ask for that person’s work history for the last three years.
Shared office space: In foreclosure filings, one judge has found that numerous mortgage-related companies, including units of Wall Street banks, all claim to share the same address: a suite of a West Palm Beach, Fla., building. “The Court ponders if Suite 100 is the size of Madison Square Garden to house all of these financial behemoths or if there is a more nefarious reason for this corporate togetherness,” the judge wrote in a recent decision.
Brooklyn Crusader: The judge making Madison Square Garden references is Brooklyn’s own Arthur M. Schack (pictured) of Kings County Supreme Court, who has dismissed dozens of foreclosures sua sponte because of shoddy documents or suspicious patterns he notices in the filings.
Schack, 63, a former counsel to the MLB Players Association who is known for peppering his rulings with pop culture references such as Bruce Willis movies, says barely any of the foreclosures he has denied eventually are completed.
In one of his foreclosure dismissals, Schack (Indiana, New York Law School) cited the film “It’s a Wonderful Life” to make the point that homeowners now deal with “large financial organizations, national and international in scope, motivated primarily by their interest in maximizing profit, and not necessarily by helping people.”
In an interview, Schack, a Brooklyn native, told WSJ: “Taking away someone’s home is a serious matter. I’m a neutral party and in reviewing papers filed with the court, I have to make sure they’re proper.”
The judge waves you into his chambers in the State Supreme Court building in Brooklyn, past the caveat taped to his wall — “Be sure brain in gear before engaging mouth” — and into his inner office, where foreclosure motions are piled high enough to form a minor Alpine chain.
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
“I don’t want to put a family on the street unless it’s legitimate,” Justice Arthur M. Schack said.
Every week, the nation’s mightiest banks come to his court seeking to take the homes of New Yorkers who cannot pay their mortgages. And nearly as often, the judge says, they file foreclosure papers speckled with errors.
He plucks out one motion and leafs through: a Deutsche Bank representative signed an affidavit claiming to be the vice president of two different banks. His office was in Kansas City, Mo., but the signature was notarized in Texas. And the bank did not even own the mortgage when it began to foreclose on the homeowner.
The judge’s lips pucker as if he had inhaled a pickle; he rejected this one.
“I’m a little guy in Brooklyn who doesn’t belong to their country clubs, what can I tell you?” he says, adding a shrug for punctuation. “I won’t accept their comedy of errors.”
The judge, Arthur M. Schack, 64, fashions himself a judicial Don Quixote, tilting at the phalanxes of bankers, foreclosure facilitators and lawyers who file motions by the bale. While national debate focuses on bank bailouts and federal aid for homeowners that has been slow in coming, the hard reckonings of the foreclosure crisis are being made in courts like his, and Justice Schack’s sympathies are clear.
He has tossed out 46 of the 102 foreclosure motions that have come before him in the last two years. And his often scathing decisions, peppered with allusions to the Croesus-like wealth of bank presidents, have attracted the respectful attention of judges and lawyers from Florida to Ohio to California. At recent judicial conferences in Chicago and Arizona, several panelists praised his rulings as a possible national model.
His opinions, too, have been greeted by a cry of affront from a bank official or two, who say this judge stands in the way of what is rightfully theirs. HSBC bank appealed a recent ruling, saying he had set a “dangerous precedent” by acting as “both judge and jury,” throwing out cases even when homeowners had not responded to foreclosure motions.
Justice Schack, like a handful of state and federal judges, has taken a magnifying glass to the mortgage industry. In the gilded haste of the past decade, bankers handed out millions of mortgages — with terms good, bad and exotically ugly — then repackaged those loans for sale to investors from Connecticut to Singapore. Sloppiness reigned. So many papers have been lost, signatures misplaced and documents dated inaccurately that it is often not clear which bank owns the mortgage.
Justice Schack’s take is straightforward, and sends a tremor through some bank suites: If a bank cannot prove ownership, it cannot foreclose.
“If you are going to take away someone’s house, everything should be legal and correct,” he said. “I’m a strange guy — I don’t want to put a family on the street unless it’s legitimate.”
Justice Schack has small jowls and big black glasses, a thin mustache and not so many hairs combed across his scalp. He has the impish eyes of the high school social studies teacher he once was, aware that something untoward is probably going on at the back of his classroom.
He is Brooklyn born and bred, with a master’s degree in history and an office loaded with autographed baseballs and photographs of the Brooklyn Dodgers. His written decisions are a free-associative trip through popular, legal and literary culture, with a sideways glance at the business pages.
Confronted with a case in which Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs passed a defaulted mortgage back and forth and lost track of the documents, the judge made reference to the film classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the evil banker played by Lionel Barrymore.
“Lenders should not lose sight,” Justice Schack wrote in that 2007 case, “that they are dealing with humanity, not with Mr. Potter’s ‘rabble’ and ‘cattle.’ Multibillion-dollar corporations must follow the same rules in the foreclosure actions as the local banks,savings and loan associations or credit unions, or else they have become the Mr. Potters of the 21st century.”
Last year, he chastised Wells Fargo for filing error-filled papers. “The court,” the judge wrote, “reminds Wells Fargo of Cassius’s advice to Brutus in Act 1, Scene 2 of William Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’: ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.’ ”
“The court wonders if the instant foreclosure action is a corporate ‘Kansas City Shuffle,’ a complex confidence game,” he reads. “In the 2006 film ‘Lucky Number Slevin,’ Mr. Goodkat, a hit man played by Bruce Willis, explains: ‘A Kansas City Shuffle is when everybody looks right, you go left.’ ”
The banks’ reaction? Justice Schack shrugs. “They probably curse at me,” he says, “but no one is interested in some little judge.”
Little drama attends the release of his decisions. Beaten-down homeowners rarely show up to contest foreclosure actions, and the judge scrutinizes the banks’ papers in his chambers. But at legal conferences, judges and lawyers have wondered aloud why more judges do not hold banks to tougher standards.
“To the extent that judges examine these papers, they find exactly the same errors that Judge Schack does,” said Katherine M. Porter, a visiting professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a national expert in consumer credit law. “His rulings are hardly revolutionary; it’s unusual only because we so rarely hold large corporations to the rules.”
Banks and the cottage industry of mortgage service companies and foreclosure lawyers also pay rather close attention.
A spokeswoman for OneWest Bank acknowledged that an official, confronted with a ream of foreclosure papers, had mistakenly signed for two different banks — just as the Deutsche Bank official did. Deutsche Bank, which declined to let an attorney speak on the record about any of its cases before Justice Schack, e-mailed a PDF of a three-page pamphlet in which it claimed little responsibility for foreclosures, even though the bank’s name is affixed to tens of thousands of such motions. The bank described itself as simply a trustee for investors.
Justice Schack came to his recent prominence by a circuitous path, having worked for 14 years as public school teacher in Brooklyn. He was a union representative and once walked a picket line with his wife, Dilia, who was a teacher, too. All was well until the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.
“Why’d I go to law school?” he said. “Thank Mayor Abe Beame, who froze teacher salaries.”
He was counsel for the Major League Baseball Players Association in the 1980s and ’90s, when it was on a long winning streak against team owners. “It was the millionaires versus the billionaires,” he says. “After a while, I’m sitting there thinking, ‘He’s making $4 million, he’s making $5 million, and I’m worth about $1.98.’ ”
So he dived into a judicial race. He was elected to the Civil Court in 1998 and to the Supreme Court for Brooklyn and Staten Island in 2003. His wife is a Democratic district leader; their daughter, Elaine, is a lawyer and their son, Douglas, a police officer.
Justice Schack’s duels with the banks started in 2007 as foreclosures spiked sharply. He saw a plague falling on Brooklyn, particularly its working-class black precincts. “Banks had given out loans structured to fail,” he said.
The judge burrowed into property record databases. He found banks without clear title, and a giant foreclosure law firm, Steven J. Baum, representing two sides in a dispute. He noted that Wells Fargo’s chief executive, John G. Stumpf, made more than $11 million in 2007 while the company’s total returns fell 12 percent.
“Maybe,” he advised the bank, “counsel should wonder, like the court, if Mr. Stumpf was unjustly enriched at the expense of W.F.’s stockholders.”
He was, how to say it, mildly appalled.
“I’m a guy from the streets of Brooklyn who happens to become a judge,” he said. “I see a bank giving a $500,000 mortgage on a building worth $300,000 and the interest rate is 20 percent and I ask questions, what can I tell you?”
Posted May 21, 2010 at 10:38 a.m. , updated May 21, 2010 at 11:57 p.m.
In the final moments of their lives, West Memphis Police Department veterans Brandon Paudert and Bill Evans encountered Thursday an old white Plymouth Voyager minivan carrying 16-year-old Joe Kane and his 45-year-oldfather, Jerry R. Kane — a man who unbeknownst to them harbored extreme anti-government views. He also had a record of previous trouble with police and a philosophy, which he credited to the Bible, of applying overwhelming violence to “conquer” foes.
Increasingly surreal revelations Friday about the Kanes gradually led to a late-evening confirmation by Arkansas State Police that Jerry Kane of Chester, Ohio, and Joe, of unknown residence, were indeed the dead suspects they believe killed Evans and Paudert — the son of the town’s chief of police.
The Kanes later wounded Crittenden County Sheriff Dick Busby and Deputy Chief W.A. Wren in the conclusive shootout at Walmart in which father and son were killed.
Jerry Kane traveled the country with his son giving seminars on what he called “mortgage fraud” and offering advice on foreclosure strategies. A website promoting those seminars provided a trove of information — audio files and YouTube videos and links to various documents — detailing his world views.
One particularly chilling YouTube clip involves Kane fielding a question about a “rogue” Internal Revenue Service agent: “Violence doesn’t solve anything, OK. It’s not violence that we’re after. The Bible even tells us that if you’re going to go and make war against somebody, you have to kill their sheep and their goats and their chickens and their babies and their wives. OK?”
In the YouTube video he said, “You have to kill them all. So what we’re after here is not fighting, it’s conquering. I don’t want to have to kill anybody, but if they keep messing with me, that’s what it’s going to have to come out. That’s what it’s going to come down to, is I’m going to have to kill. And if I have to kill one, then I’m not going to be able to stop, I just know it.”
In that video, he and Joe joke about using a bat to “take care of” a problem with an IRS agent.
In an Internet broadcast dated May 6, Jerry Kane talks about New Mexico police arresting him in April at a “Nazi checkpoint where they were demanding papers or jail.”
A woman identifying herself as Donna Lee, who lives in Clearwater, Fla., told The Commercial Appeal she was the common-law wife of Jerry Kane, and that, looking at news footage, she could identify the minivan, a black dog she called Olie escaping the van after the shootout and, finally, the lifeless body of her stepson, Joe, in front of the minivan.
At least one neighbor in Clearwater confirmed the presence of Joe and Jerry there over the past few months, although a background check showed Jerry had lived in central Ohio for much of his life — in Springfield much of the past two decades.
Other relatives confirmed similar details to The Commercial Appeal, including that another dog, named Missy Kate, was also traveling in the van. The West Memphis Animal Shelter confirmed that another dog, which had been killed, had indeed been found.
Another friend said the Kanes also traveled with a box of ashes of Jerry’s late wife, who was Joe’s mother. Lee also said Jerry Kane owned an AK-47 and carried it with him on trips because he liked taking it to shooting ranges.
But Lee insisted that Jerry and Joe Kane were doing good work, helping people with financial troubles keep their homes. A memorial website devoted to the Kanes sprang up early Friday expressing similar sentiments and featuring messages from many people clearly holding great affection — and even admiration — for father and son.
Ohio police records describe Kane as a burly man, 6-foot-2 and 230 pounds, who for a time wore a black beard. Since 1983, Kane was arrested or cited six times in Clark County, Ohio, on charges ranging from passing bad checks to criminal trespass, drunken driving and driving with expired tags.
Kane was charged with felonious assault in 2004 after allegedly shooting a 13-year-old boy in Springfield with a “handgun-style BB gun.”
Material on the website promoting Kane’s foreclosure-advising business displays classic rhetoric experts say is associated with anti-government groups. Topics discussed on the site include microchips inserted into people’s bodies, plots involving the H1N1 vaccine and the contention that U.S. dollars don’t constitute real money.
“It’s a classic Patriot or Sovereign Citizen website,” said Mark Potok, director of the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center.
In that YouTube clip about the “rogue” IRS agent, in which Jerry described his view of the proper use of violence, his son is shown laughing and offering to deal with the agent himself: “If you pay for the bat, I’ll take care of the problem.” Later, the son describes his view on violence: “They drew first blood. You are self-defending.”
Jerry Kane asks of the audience: “Can anybody tell that my son has never been to school? … He slipped though the cracks.”
Potok said a check of the Southern Poverty center’s databases found no mention of Kane, but that he clearly was at least influenced by extreme right-wing organizations. “Without question, Jerry Kane was mouthing some of the core ideas of anti-government, Patriot movement,” Potok said.
The white van in Thursday’s shootout was registered to a New Vienna, Ohio, organization called House of God’s Prayer. Potok said a former FBI informant says the building where the church was housed also once served as the headquarters for the Aryan Nations, a white supremacist group. “That was an incredibly violent bunch of people up there,” Potok said.
Lee rejected any suggestion that Jerry and Joe held racist views. She said Jerry Kane tried “to help everyone, it did not matter what their color.”
— Zack McMillin: 529-2564 — Marc Perrusquia: 529-2545
Florida-based freelancer Trevor Aaronson contributed to this story.
Buried in The Helping Families Save Their Homes Act of 2009, which the President signed into law yesterday, is an amendment to the Truth in Lending Act (TILA) that calls for a notice to the consumer when a ‘mortgage loan’ is transferred or assigned. The provision appears to be effective immediately, and violations are subject to TILA liability.
The text of the provision follows:
SEC. 404. NOTIFICATION OF SALE OR TRANSFER OF MORTGAGE LOANS. (a) IN GENERAL.—Section 131 of the Truth in Lending Act (15 U.S.C. 1641) is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(g) NOTICE OF NEW CREDITOR.— ‘‘(1) IN GENERAL.—In addition to other disclosures required by this title, not later than 30 days after the date on which a mortgage loan is sold or otherwise transferred or assigned to a third party, the creditor that is the new owner or assignee of the debt shall notify the borrower in writing of such transfer, including— ‘‘(A) the identity, address, telephone number of the new creditor; ‘‘(B) the date of transfer; ‘‘(C) how to reach an agent or party having authority to act on behalf of the new creditor; ‘‘(D) the location of the place where transfer of ownership of the debt is recorded; and ‘‘(E) any other relevant information regarding the new creditor. ‘‘(2) DEFINITION.—As used in this subsection, the term ‘mortgage loan’ means any consumer credit transaction that is secured by the principal dwelling of a consumer.’’. (b) PRIVATE RIGHT OF ACTION.—Section 130(a) of the Truth in Lending Act (15 U.S.C. 1640(a)) is amended by inserting ‘‘subsection (f) or (g) of section 131,’’ after ‘‘section 125,’’.
THIS OPENS UP A HUGE NEW AVENUE OF ATTACK AGAINST FORECLOSURE AND
Associated Press In the first quarter of this year, there were 4,226 foreclosures across the city, according to a new study.
The foreclosure problem hit New York City homeowners later than most other cities, but the problems are growing. In the first quarter of this year, there were 4,226 foreclosures across the city, up 16.3% from 3,635 foreclosures in the same period a year ago, according to data compiled by the Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy at New York University.
Queens and Brooklyn were responsible for more than 70% of all foreclosures in the city during the quarter, with 1,556 in Queens and 1,546 in Brooklyn.
Manhattan was last on the quarterly foreclosure list with 164 compared with 98 a year ago, according to the Furman Center.
Reply: Mortgage documents: Placeholder items were innocent
Posted: May 20, 2010 – 4:35pm Jacksonville.com
LPS is very involved in the Jacksonville community and highly values its role and reputation as a good corporate citizen.
Therefore, I believe it is vitally important to provide clarification to the May 14 article in The Florida Times-Union, “Florida Investigating ‘Bogus’ Foreclosure Records.”
The article discusses LPS’ subsidiary, Docx LLC, which provided a document preparation service to its customers and/or their attorneys from 2008 to 2009.
When a customer or its attorney requested that Docx prepare a document, Docx downloaded the information provided in the customer or attorney order into a pre-approved form provided by the customer or its attorney.
When preparing the documents, if specific pieces of information were not provided by the customer or attorney, Docx used the phrases “Bogus Assignee” and “Bad Bene” as highly visible placeholders that would then be replaced when the missing information was provided to Docx.
Unfortunately, on a few occasions, documents containing the placeholder phrases were inadvertently recorded before the field was updated.
While to our knowledge, none of these documents have been used in actual court proceedings, LPS deeply regrets this error.
However, these placeholder phrases had no other meaning other than to indicate that more information was needed. Docx is not a party to any court proceedings and our role ends when the prepared documents are returned to the attorney or customer.
In a separate matter, LPS reported in February that it identified a business process that caused an error in the notarization of certain documents, some of which were used in foreclosure proceedings. LPS immediately corrected the business process and believes it has completed the remedial actions necessary to minimize the impact of the error.
Finally, although LPS has not been contacted by the Florida attorney general regarding this or any other matter, LPS continues to express its willingness to cooperate with any governmental agency that contacts us.
MERS IS LOOSING BIG TIME. THEY ARE A SCAM PRODUCED TO CHEAT AMERICANS AND THOSE WHO WORK IN REAL ESTATE RECORDS FROM MILLIONS OF DOLLARS BY NOT DOING ASSIGNMENTS. THIS FACILITATED CORRUPTION AND PREDATORY LENDING BY BUILDERS, THEIR LENDERS, AND OTHERS., THIS NEEDS TO END, WE WILL MAKE SURE IT DOES. THOSE PREDATORY ATTORNEYS WHO KNOW THIS FRAUD WILL BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE. THE DOJ IS INVESTIGATING AND THE END WILL COME.
Could this mean the 60% are either in Foreclosure or Lost their homes!
Survey: 4 in 10 homeowners would consider walking away from ‘underwater’ mortgage
MIAMI – May 21, 2010 – More than 40 percent of homeowners with a mortgage say they would consider abandoning an “underwater” property, according to a national online survey released Thursday.
The study conducted this month by Harris Interactive for real estate firms Trulia and RealtyTrac touched on a topic that affects many South Floridians.
More than 371,000 homes in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties were worth less than the mortgage amount at the end of the first quarter, Zillow.com said recently.
Pete Flint, chief executive of Trulia, said on a conference call with reporters he “absolutely expects” more homeowners to walk away in the coming years as the stigma of foreclosure fades.
This is the fifth such survey of consumer attitudes since 2008, but the first time questions about underwater mortgages were included, Flint said.
Because South Florida home prices have fallen by more than 40 percent since the peak of the housing boom in 2005, underwater borrowers here may have to stay put for a decade or more until they can break even in a sale, housing experts say.
After nine months of hard fighting, yesterday financial reform came down to this: an amendment, proposed by Senators Jeff Merkley and Carl Levin that would have forced big banks to get rid of their speculative proprietary trading activities (i.e., a relatively strong version of the Volcker Rule.)
The amendment had picked up a great deal of support in recent weeks, partly because of unflagging support from Paul Volcker and partly because of the broader debate around the Brown-Kaufman amendment (which would have forced the biggest 6 banks to become smaller). Brown-Kaufman failed, 33-61, but it demonstrated that a growing number of senators were willing to confront the power of our biggest and worst banks.
Yet, at the end of the day, the Merkley-Levin amendment did not even get a vote. Why?
With home loans going bad at a still-staggering pace and losses mounting for the GSEs, the nation’s two largest mortgage financiers are pursuing several avenues to recover money, including returning poorly underwritten loans to lenders. During the first three months of this year,Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae required lenders to buy back $3.1 billion in mortgages they’d sold to the two firms.
Lenders repurchased approximately $1.8 billion in loans from Fannie in Q1, measured by unpaid principal balance, according to a recent filing by the GSE with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). During the same period last year, Fannie forced lenders to buy back $1.1 billion in bad loans.
“We conduct reviews of delinquent loans and, when we discover loans that do not meet our underwriting and eligibility requirements, we make demands for lenders to repurchase these loans or compensate us for losses sustained on the loans, as well as requests for repurchase or compensation for loans for which the mortgage insurer rescinds coverage,” Fannie wrote in the regulatory filing.
Freddie Mac sent $1.3 billion in faulty home mortgages back to the loan sellers during the January to March period, the GSE said in its Q1 SEC filing. That compares to repurchases of $789 million during the first quarter of 2009.
“We are exposed to institutional credit risk arising from the potential insolvency or non-performance by our mortgage seller/servicers, including non-performance of their repurchase obligations arising from breaches of the representations and warranties made to us for loans they underwrote and sold to us,” Freddie Mac explained in the regulatory document.
Freddie says some of its seller/servicers failed to perform their repurchase obligations due to lack of financial capacity, and many of the larger seller/servicers have not completed their buybacks “in a timely manner.”
“As of March 31, 2010 and December 31, 2009, we had outstanding repurchase requests to our seller/servicers with respect to loans with an unpaid principal balance of approximately $4.8 billion and $3.8 billion, respectively,” the GSE said.
As of the end of March, approximately 34 percent of Freddie’s outstanding purchase requests were more than 90 days past due.
“Our credit losses may increase to the extent our seller/servicers do not fully perform their repurchase obligations,” Freddie Mac wrote in the filing. “Enforcing repurchase obligations with lender customers who have the financial capacity to perform those obligations could also negatively impact our relationships with such customers and ability to retain market share.”
According to regulatory filings made by the GSEs earlier in the year, the two companies are expecting to return as much as $21 billion in home mortgages to banks in 2010. The nation’s four largest lenders – Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, and JPMorgan Chase – are the largest sellers of home loans to Fannie and Freddie and will likely take the biggest hits.
A recent report from Bloomberg noted that these banks sell mortgages to the GSEs at full value, which means they must buy them back at full value. But the news agency says at least one bank, JPMorgan Chase, says most of the loans repurchased must be immediately written down, sometimes by as much as 50 percent.
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 20, 2010; 4:10 PM
Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley signed legislation Thursday that creates a foreclosure mediation program designed to help beleaguered homeowners stay in their homes.
The bill gives homeowners the legal right to mediation with their lender during foreclosure proceedings.
“With my signature today, we are empowering our fellow Marylanders, putting them on a more equal footing with mortgage companies that too often can’t be bothered to pick up the phone before beginning a foreclosure proceeding,” O’Malley said in a statement. “This legislation will help keep more Marylanders in the homes they worked hard to purchase.”
Under the bill, the lender is required to send an application for a loan-modification or loss-mitigation program to the homeowner at least 45 days before a foreclosure action is filed in court. It is also mandated that the lender pay a $300 fee for a foreclosure filing.
The homeowner has 15 days after receiving the lender’s final loss-mitigation affidavit, which states reasons for denial of a loan modification, to request a foreclosure mediation. The request must be sent to the Circuit Court, along with a $50 fee.
The program, which is scheduled to be fully implemented by mid-August, will be handled by the Office of Administrative Hearings.
The mediation program is O’Malley’s latest effort to help homeowners stave off foreclosure.
In 2008, O’Malley proposed bills that extended the foreclosure timetable from 15 to 150 days, prohibited prepayment penalties and made egregious mortgage schemes subject to criminal prosecution.
Today, a Key West, Florida Circuit Court Judge dismissed a foreclosure action filed by Florida Default Law Group (FDLG), which was representing Bank of New York as the alleged “Trustee” of a Bear Stearns securitized mortgage loan trust. The borrower, who was represented by FDN’s Jeff Barnes, Esq., had served discovery on FDLG in late February, 2009. FDLG filed one of its form “open ended” Motions for Extension of Time to respond to the discovery (that being with no date certain for the response). FDLG failed to respond to Mr. Barnes’ good-faith request as to how much time FDLG needed to respond to the borrower’s discovery. The first “response” from FDLG came over 13 months later when FDLG objected to practically everything which Mr. Barnes asked for.
FDLG also failed to comply with the Court’s Pretrial Order, and had a history in the case of violating court orders and actually paid sanctions on prior Motion filed by Mr. Barnes. The Court dismissed the case and conditioned any re-filing on full compliance with Mr. Barnes’ discovery and the Court’s Orders.
Jeff Barnes, Esq., www.ForeclosureDefenseNationwide.com
If you believe this then you’ll believe Pigs can fly!
Housing prices are expected to increase 12.4 percent between 2010 and the end of 2014, predicts MacroMarkets, which surveyed more than 100 analysts and market strategists.
Those interviewed didn’t all see the housing market in the same light. Joseph LaVorgna, a economist at Deutsche Bank predicts that home prices will rise 37 percent by the end of 2014.
On the most bearish end, both Anthony Sanders, professor of real estate finance at George Mason University, and investment adviser Gary Shilling, president of A.Gary Shilling & Co., expect prices will decline 18 percent.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, James R. Hagerty (05/19/2010)
It’s been about nine months since several federal judges in Ohio issued the widely-read amir 
Brooklyn Crusader: The judge making Madison Square Garden references is Brooklyn’s own 
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
father, Jerry R. Kane — a man who unbeknownst to them harbored extreme anti-government views. He also had a record of previous trouble with police and a philosophy, which he credited to the Bible, of applying overwhelming violence to “conquer” foes.
![[ASSESSOR]](https://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AF813_ASSESS_G_20100520190052.jpg)
Associated Press ![[ASSESSOR_frcls]](https://sg.wsj.net/public/resources/images/NY-AF772_ASSESS_NS_20100520190031.gif)
Recent Comments