The Mortgage Electronic Registration System (MERS) was created by the mortgage industry to fast-track the loan assignment process and helped bypass the burden of having to record every assignment. MERS was a perfect solution during the mortgage securitization frenzy. When the housing bubble imploded and foreclosure activity went through the roof, MERS found itself the target … [Read more…]
The Arizona Court of Appeals (Division 1 in Maricopa County) just issued an opinion entitled Helvetica v. Pasquan, which addresses the scope of Arizona’s anti-deficiency protections in the judicial foreclosure (non-trustee’s sale) context. The first issue the Court addressed is whether refinancing a purchase money loan forfeits a borrowers’ anti-deficiency protection, to the extent that … [Read more…]
Arizona will receive $1.6 billion of the purported $25 billion joint federal-state settlement with the nation’s five largest mortgage servicers for their role in wide-spread servicer and foreclosure abuses. Arizona Attorney General Tom Horne’s decision to join the broad settlement also means that his office has reached an agreement with Bank of America over allegations … [Read more…]
In one of my prior blog posts (April 6, 2010 – "Tax Lien Foreclosure: Ready, Willing, and Able to Redeem"), I wrote about an unpublished Memorandum Decision from the Arizona Court of Appeals, Division 2 – Leveraged Land, Montgomery, v. Hodges, 2 CA-CV 2009-0057. In that Decision, the Court overturned a default judgment that a tax … [Read more…]
Bank of America, which bought Countrywide Financial for $4 billion in stock in early 2008, has come under pressure from the Massachusetts Attorney General, as a result of Countrywide’s notorious lending practices. Bank of America’s move is part of an agreement to settle claims over certain high-risk loans made by Countrywide. See link to Wall … [Read more…]