Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’
Posted on March 5th, 2011 by Mark Stopa
Below is an interesting article from the New York Times about how state attorneys general are pushing for an overhaul of the mortgage modification system. I’m glad to see this is being discussed, but I’m not terribly optimistic. As one analyst opined in the article, “I’ve watched bankers try to find ways around the rules. They are adept.”
Here’s the article. …
State attorneys general have presented the nation’s five biggest banks with a list of demands that could drastically alter the foreclosure process and give the government sweeping authority over how mortgage servicers deal with millions of Americans in danger of losing their homes.
Under the blueprint, banks would be prohibited from starting foreclosure proceedings while a borrower was actively trying to lower the interest rate or ease other terms of the home loan, a process known as a mortgage modification.
Any borrower who successfully made three payments in a trial modification would be given a permanent modification. When a modification was denied, it would be automatically reviewed by an ombudsman or independent review panel.
The proposed changes, which will be discussed by the attorneys general when they meet in Washington early next week, would compel the banks to treat each borrower in default individually.
It was the banks’ attempt to process foreclosures on a large scale that led to robo-signing, in which lawyers and bank officials signed thousands of documents a month after only a cursory review.
The ensuing furor over robo-signing, and other abuses like foreclosures that proceeded with missing documentation, prompted the attorneys general and regulators to begin a broad investigation last fall.
The blueprint from the attorneys general, obtained by The New York Times, is still just a draft, and weeks, if not months, of tough negotiations with the banks remain. Several big banks, including Citigroup, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase, declined to comment.
The government’s current program to help troubled home borrowers, known as HAMP, continues to face fierce criticism. Both conservatives and liberals have found fault with the program, which aided far fewer homeowners than originally promised.
The latest proposal, delivered to the banks late Thursday, represents an expansion of powers for the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which government officials say has taken a more aggressive stance in the talks than some other banking regulators.
The big banks are already wary of the new bureau and its overseer, Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor who has been sharply critical of the financial services industry and has pushed for a separate financial penalty of $20 billion or more.
“This further cements the C.F.P.B.’s authority in the financial space and puts them at the top of the pyramid when it comes to the mortgage modification fight,” said Jaret Seiberg, a policy analyst at MF Global in Washington. “From the perspective of the banks, this is the last place you want to be.”
On Capitol Hill, many conservatives are also wary of Ms. Warren, a sentiment echoed by Representative Scott Garrett, an influential Republican member of the House Financial Services Committee.
“I have deep concerns that an unconfirmed political appointee is making calls that affect the safety and soundness of our financial institutions,” Mr. Garrett said in a statement. “This is another attempt by the Obama administration to circumvent the rule of law and unilaterally implement its failed housing agenda at the expense of responsible homeowners.”
In addition to the attorneys general and the consumer bureau, the package is backed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Treasury, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission.
If adopted in anything like its current form, the proposal would probably compel banks to hire many more customer service employees, or slow the foreclosure process even further. Many households are already in foreclosure for more than 500 days.
But a program aimed at reducing the volume of foreclosures would affect far more than the families in distress. It would also help reshape the housing market.
About two million households are in foreclosure, and 2.2 million more are severely delinquent. Housing analysts have been waiting for these properties to make their way back onto the market, where they will swell available inventories and, at least initially, depress prices. Housing prices are already on the verge of falling through the floor established in the spring of 2009.
Giving some of these households loan modifications, allowing families to stay in their houses at least for a while, might help stabilize the market. But it also might prolong the day of reckoning, shifting a housing recovery to 2013 or 2014.
“Do you rip the Band-Aid off and deal with a shorter and sharper housing decline that ultimately puts homes in the hands of borrowers who can afford them for the long term?” said Mike Larson of Weiss Research. “Or do you let this drag on and on?”
Indeed, the big banks are already arguing that the recommendations, especially the consumer bureau’s new powers, will slow the foreclosure process and inhibit lending in the future. Banks would have to provide the agency with their formulas for determining if and when modifications would proceed, as well as quarterly reports on their internal procedures.
Training documents and videos for employees at the servicing centers would have to be reviewed by the consumer bureau and the attorneys general, who would also appoint an independent monitor to examine the banks’ compliance with any eventual settlement.
Among the provisions being proposed, the banks would have to reward their employees for pursing modifications over foreclosures. Late fees would be curtailed. A fund would compensate borrowers who were victims of banks’ misconduct, while mortgage balances would be cut in “appropriate circumstances.”
The initial reaction to the proposed changes by those who work with families in default ranged from quietly optimistic to disbelief that the banks could be compelled to change. Many earlier programs to provide homeowner relief were voluntary and did not achieve expectations.
“If these changes are enforceable and enforced, it will make a significant difference,” said Michael Calhoun, president of the Center for Responsible Lending. But he said it would require the banks to make radical changes: “This is very hands-on, time-intensive, one-off stuff.”
Walter Hackett, a former banker and managing attorney at Inland Counties Legal Services in Riverside, Calif., was less hopeful. “For 20 years I’ve watched bankers try to find ways around the rules,” he said. “They are adept.”
Mark Stopa
Posted in Main | No Comments »
Posted on December 12th, 2010 by Mark Stopa
David Bornstein of the New York Times penned a nice article today called When Lenders Won’t Listen. Here’s the part that really jumped off the page at me…
After describing the injustices experienced by several homeowners in their experiences with lenders, a competing view was presented:
There are those of us who were raised with the idea that if you make a bargain you keep it. If you say you will return something you have borrowed, whether it is a lawnmower from next door or a bank loan, then you do what you have said. … But then I was raised in a different America.
Unfortunately, I fear too many Americans, who remain unfamiliar with the foreclosure process, feel this way (presuming, of course, that position is from a homeowner and not a bank crony who is paid by the banks to sway public opinion by submitting such posts). Anyway, I loved the response of David Bornstein, the author of the article, who wrote:
Not all bargains are made in good faith, however. Borrowers and lenders, it turns out, did not share equal information in many cases. … It was predatory lending that decimated inner city neighborhoods — not anything that resembled fair deals. … [M]any homeowners across the nation did understand what they were signing even if they failed to appreciate the real risks. The difference was that the borrowers made their mistakes one house at a time, effectively as amateurs. The lenders made these mistakes as professionals, dealing with hundreds of thousands of borrowers, and they concealed the cumulative problem even as it was metastasizing. So now we have millions of homeowners who wouldn’t be in distress if not for the fact that they lost their jobs as a result of a recession that was precipitated by the very bankers who are now threatening to foreclose on them.
Wow. What a truly awesome way to describe the impetus for the problems we’re facing.
I urge all of you to forward that paragraph to your family, friends, and neighbors – unless, of course, you just want to forward this entire blog. 😉 From the words of a New York Times columnist, let’s make everyone realize the banks are the bad actors in the foreclosure crisis. After all, the first step to a solution is recognizing the problem – and clearly the greed of the Wall Street Fat Cats was and is the problem.
Mark Stopa
Posted in Main | 3 Comments »
Posted on November 8th, 2010 by Mark Stopa
The New York Times did a story over the weekend about how Florida foreclosure attorneys are charging homeowners facing foreclosure. I’ve read the article and, with respect to my colleagues, I’m disturbed. According to the article, Roy Oppenheim charges $500/month to his clients (every month the case is pending, no matter how little activity takes place in the case each month). Ice Legal charges a retainer, monthly fees, and a contingent fee. Peter Ticktin charges monthly fees plus a 40% contingent fee. As I see it, instead of trying to make their services as affordable as possible, these lawyers are trying to figure out how much they can get away with billing. I’m also troubled at the ethical quagmires created by these fee arrangements.
To illustrate my concerns, let’s take one of the examples in the article. If a client of the Ticktin lawyers gets the principal on his/her mortgage reduced from $500,000 to $200,000 (be it by modification, settlement, court order, or the like), then that homeowner owes the Ticktins $120,000 ($300,000 x 40% = $120,000). Perhaps worse yet, that $120,000 is secured by a mortgage on the client’s home. Hence, the $500,000 mortgage is reduced to $200,000, but there is now a second mortgage, payable to Ticktin, in the amount of $120,000, so the homeowner still owes $320,000.
Respectfully, isn’t it our job as foreclosure defense and bankruptcy attorneys to help homeowners avoid foreclosure? To try to reduce their debt? I realize this is a business, but I can’t help but feel that these fees are excessive. As I see it, why should Ticktin, Ice Legal, Stopa Law Firm, or any foreclosure defense attorney get a windfall if we’ve helped a client and obtained a principal reduction? Striving for favorable results is our job – it’s why we get paid. Sometimes favorable outcomes happen, sometimes they don’t, but either way, we shouldn’t get a windfall, particularly at the expense of our clients.
I’d be less disturbed about foreclosure lawyers charging a contingent fee if it was the lawyers’ only way of billing. For instance, if a lawyer somehow eliminates a mortgage from a client’s home, and hasn’t collected any fees, a contingent fee seems reasonable to me. In that scenario, the client now has a free and clear house and the lawyer helped obtain that result without getting paid, so a contingent fee seems fair. Unfortunately, there are two fatal problems with this line of thinking. First, it’s clear that these lawyers are charging more than just a contingent fee – they’re charging retainers and monthly fees, too. When the foreclosure defense attorneys are already getting a monthly fee, the contingent fee strikes me as excessive. My concerns are heightened in that regard because I find the $500 monthly fee excessive on its own. Bear in mind, in foreclosure cases, there are often many months of inactivity, where the lawyer does little or no work. As I see it, why should a lawyer keep collecting $500/month when he/she isn’t doing any work? I strongly believe the fees a foreclosure lawyer collects should bear some reasonable relationship to the work being performed.
Second, I agree with Margery Gallant, who opines in the article that the elimination of a mortgage and client owning a home free and clear is generally not “realistic.” There are undoubtedly exceptions, but the typical homeowner cannot expect that he/she can march into court and convince a judge to eliminate a mortgage and give the homeowner a free home. Don’t get me wrong – I’m always on the lookout for fact patterns that could lend themselves to this result. For the typical Floridian, though, this is not a realistic goal (especially with the climate in the judiciary being what it is). As such, I’m left wondering just what these foreclosure defense attorneys have to do to earn their contingent fee.
For example, suppose the foreclosure lawsuit is dismissed without prejudice, meaning the bank can re-file a separate suit and seek foreclosure. Should a foreclosure defense attorney be able to collect a contingent fee in that scenario? I’d argue “no,” unless the fee was very low. After all, the fees obtained should be commensurate with the results obtained, and a dismissal without prejudice does not lend itself to a $50,000 or $100,000 contingency. Unfortunately, I’ve seen contingent fee agreements that require such a payment even upon a dismissal without prejudice. As I see it, that’s grossly excessive.
Also, I strongly believe these fee arrangements are rife with conflicts. To illustrate, Tom Ice says he “doesn’t ever want to have a client say ‘I’m not taking the deal because I can’t afford to pay you.” Yet isn’t this the very dynamic that these contingent fees create? Using the example above, if the homeowner is offered a $300,000 reduction, doesn’t he/she have to think about whether he/she can pay the $120,000 mortgage to Ticktin before accepting the offer? If so, who is going to counsel the homeowner about that? Ticktin? How does that conversation go? “I’m glad you’ve been offered the $300,000 reduction – just be sure you can pay the $120,000 fee to me.”
Mr. Ticktin says he “would never enforce the mortgage and foreclose.” If that’s true, though, then why have this fee agreement in the first place? Clearly, these lawyers want to leave open the possibility of foreclosing on their clients’ homes, as otherwise they wouldn’t be including such language in their fee agreements.
Also, many homeowners facing foreclosure are candidates for bankruptcy. Using the same example, above, are the Ticktin lawyers going to give conflict-free advice to a client about bankruptcy if Ticktin has a second mortgage on the client’s home? How can they? Ticktin and the homeowner are directly adverse – the homeowner wants to eliminate the mortgage, which could happen via bankruptcy, whereas Ticktin wants to enforce it, which a bankruptcy would preclude. Undoubtedly, Ticktin’s representation to that client about the benefits of bankruptcy are impacted by its own interests in keeping the mortgage intact.
The more I study these fee agreements with other foreclosure defense attorneys, the more comfortable I feel with the fees being charged by Stopa Law Firm.
Mark Stopa
Posted in Main | 11 Comments »
Posted on October 31st, 2010 by Mark Stopa
I’m glad to see an increasing number of reporters placing the blame for the foreclosure crisis where it belongs – in the laps of the big banks. Here’s an article from the New York Times that sums up public perception:
How the Banks Put the Economy Underwater
By YVES SMITH
Published: October 30, 2010
IN Congressional hearings last week, Obama administration officials acknowledged that uncertainty over foreclosures could delay the recovery of the housing market. The implications for the economy are serious. For instance, the International Monetary Fund found that the persistently high unemployment in the United States is largely the result of foreclosures and underwater mortgages, rather than widely cited causes like mismatches between job requirements and worker skills.
This chapter of the financial crisis is a self-inflicted wound. The major banks and their agents have for years taken shortcuts with their mortgage securitization documents — and not due to a momentary lack of attention, but as part of a systematic approach to save money and increase profits. The result can be seen in the stream of reports of colossal foreclosure mistakes: multiple banks foreclosing on the same borrower; banks trying to seize the homes of people who never had a mortgage or who had already entered into a refinancing program.
Banks are claiming that these are just accidents. But suppose that while absent-mindedly paying a bill, you wrote a check from a bank account that you had already closed. No one would have much sympathy with excuses that you were in a hurry and didn’t mean to do it, and it really was just a technicality.
The most visible symptoms of cutting corners have come up in the foreclosure process, but the roots lie much deeper. As has been widely documented in recent weeks, to speed up foreclosures, some banks hired low-level workers, including hair stylists and teenagers, to sign or simply stamp documents like affidavits — a job known as being a “robo-signer.”
Such documents were improper, since the person signing an affidavit is attesting that he has personal knowledge of the matters at issue, which was clearly impossible for people simply stamping hundreds of documents a day. As a result, several major financial firms froze foreclosures in many states, and attorneys general in all 50 states started an investigation.
However, the problems in the mortgage securitization market run much wider and deeper than robo-signing, and started much earlier than the foreclosure process.
When mortgage securitization took off in the 1980s, the contracts to govern these transactions were written carefully to satisfy not just well-settled, state-based real estate law, but other state and federal considerations. These included each state’s Uniform Commercial Code, which governed “secured” transactions that involve property with loans against them, and state trust law, since the packaged loans are put into a trust to protect investors. On the federal side, these deals needed to satisfy securities agencies and the Internal Revenue Service.
This process worked well enough until roughly 2004, when the volume of transactions exploded. Fee-hungry bankers broke the origination end of the machine. One problem is well known: many lenders ceased to be concerned about the quality of the loans they were creating, since if they turned bad, someone else (the investors in the securities) would suffer.
A second, potentially more significant, failure lay in how the rush to speed up the securitization process trampled traditional property rights protections for mortgages.
The procedures stipulated for these securitizations are labor-intensive. Each loan has to be signed over several times, first by the originator, then by typically at least two other parties, before it gets to the trust, “endorsed” the same way you might endorse a check to another party. In general, this process has to be completed within 90 days after a trust is closed.
Evidence is mounting that these requirements were widely ignored. Judges are noticing: more are finding that banks cannot prove that they have the standing to foreclose on the properties that were bundled into securities. If this were a mere procedural problem, the banks could foreclose once they marshaled their evidence. But banks who are challenged in many cases do not resume these foreclosures, indicating that their lapses go well beyond minor paperwork.
Increasingly, homeowners being foreclosed on are correctly demanding that servicers prove that the trust that is trying to foreclose actually has the right to do so. Problems with the mishandling of the loans have been compounded by the Mortgage Electronic Registration System, an electronic lien-registry service that was set up by the banks. While a standardized, centralized database was a good idea in theory, MERS has been widely accused of sloppy practices and is increasingly facing legal challenges.
As a result, investors are becoming concerned that the value of their securities will suffer if it becomes difficult and costly to foreclose; this uncertainty in turn puts a cloud over the value of mortgage-backed securities, which are the biggest asset class in the world.
Other serious abuses are coming to light. Consider a company called Lender Processing Services, which acts as a middleman for mortgage servicers and says it oversees more than half the foreclosures in the United States. To assist foreclosure law firms in its network, a subsidiary of the company offered a menu of services it provided for a fee.
The list showed prices for “creating” — that is, conjuring from thin air — various documents that the trust owning the loan should already have on hand. The firm even offered to create a “collateral file,” which contained all the documents needed to establish ownership of a particular real estate loan. Equipped with a collateral file, you could likely persuade a court that you were entitled to foreclose on a house even if you had never owned the loan.
That there was even a market for such fabricated documents among the law firms involved in foreclosures shows just how hard it is going to be to fix the problems caused by the lapses of the mortgage boom. No one would resort to such dubious behavior if there were an easier remedy.
The banks and other players in the securitization industry now seem to be looking to Congress to snap its fingers to make the whole problem go away, preferably with a law that relieves them of liability for their bad behavior. But any such legislative fiat would bulldoze regions of state laws on real estate and trusts, not to mention the Uniform Commercial Code. A challenge on constitutional grounds would be inevitable.
Asking for Congress’s help would also require the banks to tacitly admit that they routinely broke their own contracts and made misrepresentations to investors in their Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Would Congress dare shield them from well-deserved litigation when the banks themselves use every minor customer deviation from incomprehensible contracts as an excuse to charge a fee?
There are alternatives. One measure that both homeowners and investors in mortgage-backed securities would probably support is a process for major principal modifications for viable borrowers; that is, to forgive a portion of their debt and lower their monthly payments. This could come about through either coordinated state action or a state-federal effort.
The large banks, no doubt, would resist; they would be forced to write down the mortgage exposures they carry on their books, which some banking experts contend would force them back into the Troubled Asset Relief Program. However, allowing significant principal modifications would stem the flood of foreclosures and reduce uncertainty about the housing market and mortgage securities, giving the authorities time to devise approaches to the messy problems of clouded titles and faulty loan conveyance.
The people who so carefully designed the mortgage securitization process unwittingly devised a costly trap for people who ran roughshod over their handiwork. The trap has closed — and unless the mortgage finance industry agrees to a sensible way out of it, the entire economy will be the victim.
Posted in Main | No Comments »
Posted on October 19th, 2010 by Mark Stopa
I love today’s article by David Streitfeld of the New York Times:
Intermission, at Best, in Battle Over Foreclosures
Aside from appropriately acknowleding that Foreclosure-Gate is far from over, the article reflects the point I’ve been emphasizing for many months – Florida judges are starting to realize that just because the banks want things to return to ”business as usual” doesn’t mean our courts should. We’ve all seen and learned far too much to let banks keep pushing through foreclosure cases like they’re in front of a conveyor belt at a factory.
Also, notice how the New York Times continues to discuss foreclosures on a national level by talking to lawyers and judges right here in Florida? Tampa, West Palm Beach, Sarasota … this is the ground zero of the foreclosure crisis. Lawyers such as myself, Matt Weidner, and a handful of others, along with websites like www.foreclosurehamlet.com and www.4closurefraud.com … we are making a difference. So if you’re a homeowner facing foreclosure, don’t give up. We are making headway, and the nation is watching us.
Here’s the article:
Bank of America may be trying to bring down the curtain on the foreclosure furor, but there were numerous indications Tuesday that the problems would not move off-stage so quickly. A day after the bank said it would once again pursue defaulting borrowers in the 23 states where foreclosures were overseen by the courts, judges in Florida said they were expecting even more challenges from defaulting homeowners.
The White House is convening a meeting of regulators and administration officials on Wednesday to review federal investigations into the foreclosure crisis, while state law enforcement officials emphasized their inquiry into flawed foreclosures was continuing. “There has been an attempt by some of the major servicers to indicate there are no problems,” said Patrick Madigan, an assistant attorney general in Iowa. “We’re not at the end of this process. We’re at the beginning.”
All 50 state attorneys general have joined in an investigation into lenders’ foreclosure processes, which in at least some cases appear to have been so sloppy that legal requirements went by the wayside.
The lenders maintain the errors involved mere technicalities, while lawyers for defaulting homeowners say they are symptomatic of a foreclosure system out of control.
The Obama administration, which declined last week to push for a national freeze on foreclosures, emphasized Tuesday that it was committed to holding accountable any bank that had violated the law. Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said that the administration was “strongly supporting the investigation by the state attorneys general” while noting that the Federal Housing Administration and Financial Fraud Enforcement Task Force have undertaken their own investigation.
Federal regulators have been looking into loan servicing problems for some months before the recent freezes by the big lenders. The meeting at the White House on Wednesday, which will be attended by the housing and urban development secretary, Shaun Donovan, among others, will focus in part on concerns about the foreclosure crisis’s effect on the housing market and the larger economy.
In remarks at a quarterly news briefing Tuesday, William C. Dudley, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, said the Fed was “seeking to establish the facts” in conjunction with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.
“We want to ensure that the housing finance business is supported by robust back office operations,” he said. He gave no timetable for when such a review might be completed. Whatever the outcome of the various investigations, the era when the vast majority of foreclosures were unopposed and easily granted may be waning. Some judges in Florida, the state whose courtrooms are the most overwhelmed by foreclosures, said they were likely to scrutinize the papers submitted by the big lenders with extra care.
“If we get information that there was a problem with a prior affidavit, maybe we look more carefully at the next one,” said Peter D. Blanc, chief judge of the 15th Judicial Circuit in West Palm Beach, Fla.
Thomas McGrady, chief judge of the Sixth Judicial Circuit in Clearwater, said it was still an open question for him and other judges whether they would accept amended documents from Bank of America or force the lender to refile its cases. “All of the courts are struggling with this,” Mr. McGrady said.
The investigation by the state attorneys general is so new — it was formed last week — that its scope is still being settled. Behind the question of improper foreclosure documentation lies a more important issue of whether lenders even have legal standing to foreclose because they lack the original mortgage note as required by law.
“The problems are not over, but their extent remains to be seen,” said Mr. Madigan, the Iowa assistant attorney general.
Bank of America, the country’s largest lender, announced it was unfreezing foreclosures in the 23 states less than three weeks after it froze them. A process that many expected to take months was completed in days.
In its statement, the bank said that it had “reviewed our process” and found it satisfactory enough to file new affidavits in 102,000 pending cases starting next week. Documents in those cases were presumably improperly done before. A bank spokesman declined Tuesday to explain more fully the lender’s review process.
GMAC Mortgage, another large lender that had announced a freeze, also said it was refiling cases. “We have more training, more people, a more robust policy now,” Gina Proia, a spokeswoman said.
Four years ago, in a case that foreshadowed the current uproar, a Florida court censured GMAC for false testimony. An employee said in a deposition that she had neither reviewed the record of the mortgage in the case nor known how it was created, which contradicted her sworn affidavit.
GMAC promised at the time to clean up its procedures, reminding employees not to sign court pleadings unless they had independently reviewed and checked the facts. Despite GMAC and Bank of America’s proclamations that everything is now being done by the book, some legal and financial experts are disbelieving.
“The banks have dragged their feet and taken forever to do loan modifications, yet within less than two weeks they have managed to review hundreds of thousands of foreclosure cases,” said Adam J. Levitin, an associate professor of law at the Georgetown University Law Center. “It is simply not credible.” Mr. Levitin is convinced that the lenders will suffer for what he sees as their attempt to put themselves above the rules. “The genie is out of the bottle,” he said.
While most cases in Florida are still unopposed, the judges there are already starting to see an increase in defendants with counsel, even if they are simply acting as their own lawyer. “The largest impact has been from the publicity,” said Lee E. Haworth, chief justice of the 12th Judicial Circuit in Sarasota. ”A lot more borrowers are coming forward to oppose summary judgment. More hearings are going to be contested.”
Posted in Main | No Comments »
Posted on October 2nd, 2010 by Mark Stopa
The New York Times and USA Today are now reporting what I’ve been writing here for quite some time (quoting me in both articles) – all of the problems we’re now seeing with BofA, GMAC, Chase, etc. … it’s all tied to the title insurance industry.
New York Times
USA Today
Sadly, I’ve been arguing this to judges for nearly two years, but only now is the story getting out. To illustrate, here’s a quote from my Certiorari Petition (on a Motion to Disqualify Counsel) to the Second District that I filed in July:
“…[T]he real estate market in Florida will collapse even further than it already has once title insurance companies have to pay claims where the actual holder of a Note emerges after a different bank has already foreclosed. It’s not hard to foresee, once that happens, title insurance companies will stop issuing policies altogether, as they’d have no way to do so with any confidence that the foreclosure sales provided clear title to the purchaser. Respectfully, this is a problem that must be avoided.”
The judiciary should have realized, long ago, that it couldn’t push through millions of foreclosure judgments, essentially all at once, in what everyone now knows to be a sloppy, haphazard manner, without running the risk of destroying the title insurance industry.
Posted in Main | 1 Comment »
Posted on October 1st, 2010 by Mark Stopa
Bank of America has stopped all foreclosures in 23 states amidst proof that another robo-signer executed 8,000 documents a month without reading them.
I’m quoted in the article, saying “judges have to force banks to do foreclosures correctly.” Obviously I don’t control what goes into these articles, but that sums it up pretty well.
Posted in Main | No Comments »
Posted on October 1st, 2010 by Mark Stopa
The New York Times, arguably the top newspaper in the nation, is covering Florida’s foreclosure crisis on a daily basis.
Foreclosure Fraud in New York Times
I bet I exchanged 20 emails with Mr. Streitfeld before he wrote this article. We’re all busy, but we have to keep feeding this information to the media. They can’t write a story if they don’t know the facts.
Posted in Main | No Comments »
