Mortgage Note Issues Help Debtors Avoid Foreclosure

[SLCPUNK]

By BOB IVRY, Bloomberg News

Published: February 23, 2008

Updated: 02/22/2008 08:33 pm

Joe Lents hasn't made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That's when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents' mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

"If you're going to take my house away from me, you better own the note," said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Judges in at least five states have stopped foreclosure proceedings because the banks that pool mortgages into securities and the companies that collect monthly payments haven't been able to prove they own the mortgages. The confusion is another headache for U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson as he revises rules for packaging mortgages into securities.

"I think it's going to become pretty hairy," said Josh Rosner, managing director at the New York-based investment research firm Graham Fisher & Co. "Regulators appear to have ignored this, given the size and scope of the problem."

More than $2.1 trillion, or 19 percent, of outstanding mortgages have been bundled into securities by private banks, according to Inside Mortgage Finance, a Bethesda, Md.-based industry newsletter. Those loans may be sold several times before they land in a security.

Shortcuts Taken With Paperwork

Each time the mortgages change hands, the sellers are required to sign over the mortgage notes to the buyers. In the rush to originate more loans during the U.S. mortgage boom from 2003 to 2006, that assignment of ownership wasn't always properly completed, said Alan White, assistant professor at Valparaiso University School of Law in Valparaiso, Ind.

"Loans were mass produced and short cuts were taken," White said. "A lot of the paperwork is done in the name of the original lender and a lot of the original lenders aren't around anymore."

More than 100 mortgage companies stopped making loans, closed or were sold last year, according to Bloomberg data.

The foreclosure rate, at 1.69 percent of all U.S. homeowners, is the highest since the Mortgage Bankers Association began tracking it in 1993. The foreclosure rate for subprime is at a four-year high, according to the mortgage bankers.

More than 1.5 million homeowners will enter the foreclosure process this year, said Rick Sharga, executive vice president for marketing at RealtyTrac Inc., the Irvine, Calif.-based seller of foreclosure information. About half of them, 750,000, will have their homes repossessed, Sharga said.

Borrower advocates, including Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, have seized upon the issue of missing mortgage notes as a way to stem foreclosures.

"The best thing to do is to keep people in their homes and for everybody to take steps necessary to make that happen," said Chris Geidner, a lawyer in Dann's office. "These trusts are purchasing these notes, and before they even get the paperwork, they foreclose on people."

When the mortgage servicers and securitizing banks that act as trustees of the securities fail to present proof that they own a mortgage, they sometimes file what's called a lost-note affidavit, said April Charney, a lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid.

She's had foreclosure proceedings for 300 clients dismissed or postponed in the past year, with about 80 percent of them involving lost-note affidavits, she said.

"They raise the issue of whether the trusts own the loans at all," Charney said. "Lost-note affidavits are pattern and practice in the industry. They are not exceptions. They are the rule."

State laws make it difficult to foreclose because they favor the homeowner, said Stuart Saft, a real estate lawyer and partner at the New York firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.

"All these loan documents are being sent to the inside of a mountain in the middle of America and not being checked very carefully," Saft said. "The lenders can't find the paper."

Requiring banks to produce the paperwork at a foreclosure hearing is a nuisance, said Jeffrey Naimon, a partner in the Washington office of Buckley Kolar LLP.

"It's a gigantic waste of time," Naimon said. "The mortgage may have transferred five, six, eight times. It's possible that you don't have all the pieces of paper, but it was enough to convince the next guy in the chain. There's no true controversy over whether the owner owns the loan."

Judges Helping 'The Little Guy'

Judges are becoming increasingly impatient with plaintiffs who produce no more proof of ownership than a lost-note affidavit, said Michael Doan, an attorney at Doan Law Firm LLP in Carlsbad, Calif.

Federal District Judge Christopher Boyko dismissed 14 foreclosure cases in Cleveland in November because of the inability of the trustee and the servicer to prove ownership of the mortgages.

Similar cases were dismissed during the past year by judges in California, Massachusetts, Kansas and New York.

"Judges are human beings," said Kenneth M. Lapine, a partner at the Cleveland law firm Roetzel & Andress LPA. "They no doubt feel the little guy needs all the help he can get against the impersonal, out of town, mega-investment banking company."

Lents is former CEO of Investco Inc., a Boca Raton-based developer of voice recognition software. In 2002, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sanctioned Lents and others for stock manipulation, according to the SEC Web site. He lost his job, was fined and his assets were frozen.

"If the homeowner doesn't object to the lost-note affidavit, the judge rubber-stamps it," Lents said. "Is it oversight, or are they trying to get around the law?"

Washington Mutual spokeswoman Geri Ann Baptista said the bank had no comment.

"I can't believe the handling of notes is worse than it was five years ago," said Guy Cecala, publisher of Inside Mortgage Finance. "What we didn't have back then were armies of attorneys out there looking for loopholes. People are challenging foreclosures and courts are paying a lot more attention to foreclosures than they ever did before."

American Home Mortgage Investment Corp., the Melville, N.Y.-based lender that filed for bankruptcy last August, said it was paying $45,000 a month to store loan paperwork.

The home-loan industry has had a central electronic database since 1997 to track mortgages as they are bought and sold. It's run by Mortgage Electronic Registration System, or MERS, a subsidiary of Vienna, Va.-based MERSCORP Inc., which is owned by mortgage companies.

MERS has 3,246 member companies and about half of outstanding mortgages are registered with the company.

For about half of U.S. mortgages, there is no tracking mechanism.

MERS rules don't allow members to submit lost-note affidavits in place of mortgage notes, said R.K. Arnold, the company's CEO.

"A lot of companies say the note is lost when it's highly unlikely the note is lost," Arnold said. "Saying a note is lost when it's not really lost is wrong."

Lents' attorney, Jane Raskin of Raskin & Raskin in Miami, said she has no idea who owns Lents' mortgage note.

"Something is wrong if you start from what I think is the reasonable assumption that these banks are not losing all of these notes," Raskin said. "As an officer of the court, I find it troubling that they've been going in and saying we lost the note, and because nobody is challenging it, the foreclosures are pushed through the system."

[Albert S Miller]

What a mess!!  I know I bought a new home 6 months ago and mortgage has already been sold once.  Who knows?

Washington Mutual is propably the worst bank I have ever dealt with since being a homeowner.  My husband and I requested they not even be an option in regards to the lending of new home.

Back in about 99 my husband I purchased a rental property through Wamoo as they are sometimes referred to.  We bought the property on an arm. On the payment due date every month I litterally drove payment to the bank and made it.  After owning property for about 15 or so months (mind you we think all is well) we were trying to finance another home, when all of a sudden it comes up that we have defaulted on our mortgage and we are definately showing late payment, when in fact I had made every single payment on the day it was due, and it gets even better we also found out same day that rental property was going into forclosure in just days.   Basically what happened was that for the first 12 months payment stayed the same, but because loan was on an arm the payments changed without any notification via phone, mail or anything.  They literally did not notify us at all, not even while they are still excepting payment on my loan every month are they saying there is a problem.  So what they were doing was taking my pmnt every month and putting it into what they called a suspence account as the payment was not enough after first year it had changed.  So they start storing up my money everymonth in a very special account of theirs and began forclosure proceedings with zero notification on anything what so ever.  Great Huh!!  If it was not for the fact that we were looking to by another property at that time we would have never even known our property was illegally in forclosure, and we would have lost it, oh and on top of that they managed to loose and never repay 10k in lost money.  Needless to say in the end and after much time and grief mess was closed, we resumed ownership of property but not our missing money they could never figure out how to pay back.

[SLCPUNK]

Credit card companies have been doing that too with physical checks. They take them, don't endorse them, then hit the consumer with a late, or non payment fee. Electronic is the way to go.