Fannie Mae claims to have owned my mortgage a month BEFORE we bought the house!

[dixiegrrrrl]

I got curious as to who was claiming to own our mortgage, since it has been reported that Countrywide, our original lender, had destroyed all mortgage paperwork and actually had passed nothing on to Bank of America when it bought Countrywide's mortgages.

All the mortgage fraud and robo signing occurred, to hide the fact that foreclosures were illegal without the mortgage note by the lender.
At some point since 2008, the banks were supposedly selling the mortgages to Fannie Mae.

So, looked up who owns our mortgage...
says Fannie Mae has owned it, since 9-1-2005.
Which is before we bought the house, before we signed any loan papers, and before Countrywide sent the confirmation letter saying the mortgage was effective Oct. 1, 2005.

Man, it goes deep, doesn't it?

[question everything]

1. Didn't you get the title researched?

If it is done well, you can really track who owned what and when.

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Nope, can't track it....remember MERS????

That was the whole point of the banks creating Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems...which was supposed to track all the bank mortgages from servicer to servicer, to track all the mortgages in the bond funds.
And, incidently, to keep from having to pay the recording fees at the county level everytime a mortgage changed hands in the banking system.
And absoutely to hide the fact that the mortgage notes may not have been actually in thetrusts...or that banks may have sold the mortgage note to more than one trust.
So, often the county does not have a record of the various mortgage holders over time.
MERS has been sued many times over, by counties and states, judges always seem to rule in their favor, mostly.

[customerserviceguy]

4. The mortgage was recorded on a certain date

and then it was sent into MERS. Any title searcher in your county can find that exact date. I have a feeling that someone made a clerical error on the document that gave the incorrect earlier date, but the facts can certainly be discovered.

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. Yeah, I can pop over to the courthouse and check

Lovely thing about this being such a small town..

[customerserviceguy]

6. They're public records

You can do it anyplace. It just gets to be a big parking hassle in a big city.

[ms.smiler]

21. Customerserviceguy, would you kindly comment for me on an unusual situation?

There is something that puzzles me in my local land records. My state is a must record state, within 90 days of conveyance.

There is a property that had a Sheriff Deed in the name of an S & L that was closed during the scandal. During the same period I see many documents recorded on other properties in the name of the defunct S & L and Resolution Trust. It’s as though Resolution Trust came onto all the documents that were filed in the land records with that S & L. Satisfactions were filed in both names and both names appear on Assignments and Deeds. There is though that lone Sheriff Deed that doesn’t appear to have been conveyed, nor was there a mortgage that was filed or conveyed.

It really appears to me that Resolution Trust missed the one property. The Title remained unchanged for 20 years until a Quit Claim Deed was filed to an individual from a mortgage servicer and authorized agent for Wachovia current successors in interest to the S & L. Wachovia though doesn’t appear in the chain of Title.

So I’m wondering how Wachovia appears and becomes involved in the property. What was conveyed to them and what could they possibly convey?

So at the point where the Quit Claim Deed was filed, how readily would Title to the property be insurable? Should an individual in that situation be satisfied with such a Quit Claim Deed? Is such a property marketable?

I appreciate your experience and expertise, thank you.

[customerserviceguy]

22. My experience is about eight years old at this point

but let me give it a shot.

The Resolution Trust Corporation was established to acquire the assets of failed S & L's in the wake of the great shakeout of housing lenders in the interest rate collapse of the 1980's. It's primary purpose was to find ways of getting private equity into the portfolios of the failed lenders, but it was also given broad authority to sell the assets of these institutions when they collapsed.

Much more often than not, an assignment or release of a financial instrument involves reciting the names of the original parties as part of the identification of the loan being sold or satisfied. That way, if there is an error in one of say, five terms, the other four establish intent without regard to the transcription mistake (often called scrivener's error). That's why the defunct S & L's names would appear on the documents you were looking at.

I would imagine nearly 100% of all mortgages and foreclosed properties were accounted for in wrapping up RTC's business. However, failed institutions sometimes have incomplete records, and it wouldn't surprise me that a few here and there fell through the cracks. Oh, they might have had someone paying taxes on them, but nobody saw them on a list of assets to be dealt with. It's possible some renters or others might have even acquired title to them, but this is probably a rare exception.

Any properties that didn't have taxes paid on them would have certainly gone to a tax sale, but in many places, tax deeds are difficult to get insured. Sometimes title companies will insure title if they can figure out how to get any possible loose ends resolved, and it's my guess that Wachovia was the successor in interest to either the original lender or perhaps a second lender that didn't get proper notice.

Quit claim deeds (occasionally erroneously called "Quick claim deeds&quot simply transfer whatever interest the grantor has in the property, if any, to the grantee. I could give you a QCD to the Chrysler building, and it would be legal, even though I don't own any interest in that property. They contain no warranty of title, and their highest use is to tie up loose ends resulting from a title search. Often family members use them to convey property interests within the group, and since they're not accompanied by the hoopla surrounding an arms-length transaction involving unrelated sellers and buyers with mortgages and title searches involved, that's how they got the nickname "quick".

It all depends on what else happened in the chain of title as to how insurable it was, and the deed recording office is only part of the story. Courts of competent jurisdiction can also render judgments that change the effect of ownership, they may or may not be referenced by deeds in the deed recorder's office.

Hope that helps!

[DirkGently]

28. Succession of interest doesn't show in the chain

If Wachovia bought the S & L, or was given it by the RTC, they accede to the S & L's interest by way of a document that doesn't have to be recorded. They simply "are" that company in terms of anything it owned.

[ms.smiler]

45. DirkGently, thank you. I was curious about the purchase of such assets.

So Wachovia could have owned the asset without it being necessary to file any new documents. Wouldn't they grant someone a Deed though and not a Quit Claim?

Can you comment on any liability in such an asset purchase? The S & L was closed because of fraud. Would the fraudulent activity have been separated somehow from the assets that were sold? Even after an audit and investigation, could there be liabilities that pass along with assets in such an acquisition? I'm thinking in terms of the new owner as standing in the place of the previous owner.

[DirkGently]

46. QCD is a strange thing for a lending institution to do.

That means they're giving no warranty of title at all. So generally no, they're not going to be liable if something's wrong with the title. Typically they give a Special Warranty Deed out of foreclosure.

Also weird that a Sheriff's Deed, if that's what I understood you to say, went to an S & L in the first place. Those generally happen when someone's executing on a lawsuit.

Also, Wells Fargo is the successor to Wachovia in most matters, just by the way.

[ms.smiler]

47. Thank you again DirkGently. So the individual has no guarantee regarding the Title

and Wachovia has no liability regarding the Title if a defect is discovered.

In your opinion, at the point where the Quit Claim Deed was filed, how readily would Title to the property be insurable? Should an individual in that situation be satisfied with such a Quit Claim Deed? Is such a property marketable?

[DirkGently]

48. The QCD isn't a problem in itself. Might cause some a bit

more scrutiny, but in the absence of some other weirdness, it shouldn't cause the owner a problem.

Edit: Back to the Sheriff's Deed. That's still weird. Someone would probably take a second look there. Still not an issue per se, but worthy of a second look.

[Samantha]

10. Yes, but a lot of transactions were not recorded with the Recorder of Deeds locally

This was to avoid taxes on the sale, or as the banks saw it, cutting into the proceeds of their transactions. So I am not sure one can always find that information with the Recorder of Deeds.

This was one of the items that came out with the official revelations how these transactions were conducted.

Sam

[customerserviceguy]

11. I spent twenty-five years in the title insurance industry

One of the first things I learned was "first to record is first in rights". While assignments and transfers of the beneficial interest in mortgages might have been kept hidden, the recording of the original document that established the first lien position of a mortgage interest is of paramount importance to a lender.

Yes, in some states there are taxes on mortgages, but the borrower always pays them, there is no incentive to hold back on a document that establishes rights in a property, especially when someone else might well record such a document ahead of you. Were there sloppy transactions? No doubt, but they were not deliberate. It just wouldn't benefit the lender.

[Samantha]

13. I am repeating to you what was reported more than once at that time

Many states were upset because they calculated they had lost a lot of money. I don't think this has been the normal process, I think you are right most people would expect the transaction to have been recorded, but evidently it was deliberate and done to save money. I particularly was horrified to learn this but my mortgage was not one of those. There were a lot of things done during those years that were horrendous.

Sam

[customerserviceguy]

14. Then whoever the closer was

Be it a title company, escrow company, or an attorney, they screwed up. A title insurance company won't even issue a mortgagee's title insurance policy until there is a recorded mortgage to insure.

If you have any links to the story you read, I'd be very interested in reviewing them. I learned a long time ago that if I read a story about something I really, really knew something about, that I could find mistakes in the coverage of a reporter who just got a quickie lesson in the subject.

[Samantha]

15. Here is just one example

"Banks and lenders used MERS to avoid the cost of filing paperwork at county land registries all over the country as mortgages were bundled, bought and sold. When banks started being challenged in court as to their ownership of the mortgages, they had to find a way to generate paperwork."

http://www.salemnews.com/local/x775920465/Register-of-deeds-refuses-to-record-robo-signed-mortgage-documents/print

If you try a Google, you go thru many, many pages because this happened some time ago. But this article is responding to how after the fact, some chose to deal with the issue.

Sam

[customerserviceguy]

16. I'm fully aware of that story

It never says anything about recording of the original mortgage documents. What they're referring to in the article you cited are assignments of mortgages, and I know full and well that MERS was used to get around recording fees (and other fees that various jurisdictions charge) for transferring the beneficial interest in mortgages.

I'm standing by my original assertion, that the document signed by a borrower, in other words, the original mortgage, would have been recorded. Robo-signing occurred on bulk assignments of a group of mortgages only. If you've ever seen a mortgage document, the lender doesn't sign them, they are granted rights by those instruments.

[dixiegrrrrl]

19. My original mortgage WAS recorded.

I know that for a fact.
Original lender of record was Countrywide, they had the office in the same building as the title company does.
This is a VERY small town, I know everyone involved in my mortgage process, I was present when the recording was confirmed.
BOA bought out Countrywide a few years after my mortgage, and Fannie Mae bought the mortgages from BOA and other banks to bail them out a few years later.
Since Fannie Mae website has my mortgage listed as them being the current owner, and since MERS was foreclosing most of the homes in our country for years, I can pretty well assume that assignments went thru MERS here and were not recorded.
The issue I am going to check out is how come Fannie Mae records show them as being in possession of my mortgage, under my name, before we even started the closing process.
checking out the MERS angle was something I have had on the back burner for some time...
the time to poke around the reocrds has come.

[customerserviceguy]

23. My best guess

is that there was a transcription error when someone entered information from the mortgage records on to their computer database. No doubt, they farmed it out to the lowest bidder, who may have done some sloppy work.

[pnwmom]

42. Dixiegrrrrl, that sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

good luck

[Samantha]

25. Yes, not the original mortgage but those bundled and backed by securities

See my post below.

Additionally, when this issue arose in Florida, it was discovered that MERS by virtue of the way it was created, was never intended to "own" any title. The reason for that is the lenders did not want to have to pay IRS taxes on a profit. But when companies started going belly up that held the actual mortgage, title was dumped onto MERS anyway, which the State of Florida (excuse me, it was either Florida or Kentucky) revealed should never have been done.

There were a lot of things that happened during that period of time which were unorthodox and adversely impacted innocent homeowners. That is all I am saying, and I do believe the articles that were published at that time substantiated that.

Sam

[Yo_Mama]

17. Yes, but that's not about recording of mortgages, but other recordings

Recording assignments is different than recording the mortgage itself.

Neither Fannie nor the trusts accept mortgages that have not been recorded per state law. Now that requirement exists as a stipulation in the purchasing and trust agreements (which give Fannie or other trustees the right to force the seller to rebuy the purchased mortgage if it has not been recorded), and there may have been mortgages that were not recorded.

But most mortgages were recorded. In some areas, the courthouses got so backed up that they may have been recorded later. Some originators in some places where that happened were recording other documents early to show that they were going to record a mortgage because of that problem.

Assignments can be recorded later, after the fact. But mortgages are recorded just about as quickly as the clerks get to them.

[Samantha]

24. This article better references what I am talking about

“MERS members pay recording fees when the mortgage is recorded,” she continued. “When Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. is the mortgagee (i.e., holds the legal title to the mortgage lien), there is no need for an assignment of the mortgage lien between its members because MERS remains the mortgagee holding legal title to the mortgage as the common agent for them. The need for an assignment is eliminated because title to the mortgage lien has been grounded in MERS.

"Nevertheless, O’Brien said as a result of MERS, “For the first time in my tenure … I can’t honestly look somebody in the eye that has a MERS mortgage and tell them who owns it, because they (MERS) have not followed the same rules as everyone else. (emphasis added)

"As states’ investigations into MERS’s practices continue, O’Brien hopes recorders and registers of deeds will “have a seat at the table.

“Anybody negotiating a settlement with these banks on these recording fees and the damage that they’ve done to the chain of title and such, registers of deeds should be in that room,” he said. “We’re the front-line men and women who deal with this every single day. We need to be in that room before this thing is shuffled off to Buffalo.”

http://www.naco.org/newsroom/countynews/Current%20Issue/5-9-11/Pages/Countyrecorders,registersofdeedsWe%E2%80%99relosingmoneytoMERS.aspx

If you read the entire article, it references mortgages bundled with securities. There were a number of articles that came out protesting the loss of revenue by states because transactions had not been sent to the Recorder of Deeds, some states call it Registrar of Deeds, in those bundles. Several states said they lost a lot of money during this period of time.

Sam

[ms.smiler]

29. Samantha, how about you compare MERS cute little theory about the lack of a need to

record Assignments with Pennsylvania law.

21 P.S. § 444 “All deeds and conveyances, … or whereby the title to the same may be in any way affected in law or equity, ……shall be recorded in the office for the recording of deeds where such lands, ….. are lying and being, within ninety days after the execution of such deeds or conveyance, and every such deed and conveyance that shall at any time after the passage of this act be made and executed in this commonwealth, and which shall not be proved and recorded as aforesaid, shall be adjudged fraudulent and void…..”

The banksters most certainly filed the original mortgage liens in the land records. Once the mortgage was established in the lawful land records, the Assignments then took place not within our land records system but within the private MERS database. Think of MERS as a privatized land records system.

Many transfers of the loans took place, all within MERS, not our public land records. This conveniently hid securities fraud that took place on Wall Street. After the Note was used to defraud investors, the mortgage lien is used to defraud homeowners.

MERS created breaks and gaps in the chain of Title so the banksters use robosigned documents to paper over the gaps and create the appearance that they own the loans.

I provide a comprehensive explanation here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=439x2412603


By using MERS rather than our land records, the banksters also saved themselves billions of dollars in recordation fees. As a homeowner I realized that the banksters and MERS clouded my property Title and so I filed a lawsuit.

I hope the day arrives soon when homeowners finally realize that the banksters owe them more in damages than whatever the homeowner might still owe in unsecured debt.

[Yo_Mama]

32. Ms. Smiler, in a must-record state the original documents are usually done in MERS name.

Or there is an assignment to MERS.

That is entirely legal under PA law, as long as the assignment is legal.

[ms.smiler]

33. Regardless of MERS business practices, PA statutes require that ALL

conveyances be filed in the county land records within 90 days. There is no exception for MERS or Nominee. There are no exceptions.

Each time the Note is conveyed, an Assignment by law is required to be filed in the county land records. This is why the Montgomery County Recorder of Deeds has sued MERS, to compel them to file the missing Assignments and to pay the required recording fees.

Do you believe that mortgage backed securities were sold to investors, or that non-mortgage backed securities were sold to them? According to the Pooling & Servicing agreements, the Trusts should have had liens upon the properties within 90 days, before the Trusts closed. How often if ever did that happen?

[Yo_Mama]

38. Once the mortgage is done in MERS' name, there is no conveyance

Thus no legal need for for an assignment to be recorded.

The issues of the legalities of the trusts are entirely different, based on state law and the trust agreements.

Sale of bonds to investors based on the anticipated payment stream from a pool of mortgages does not convey a mortgage. Transfer of a beneficial interest in a property is not transfer of the property under common law.

There have been legal cases which determined that the trust did not indeed have the ownership interest. Thus MERS procedure has changed somewhat, in that when a Trustee wishes to foreclose, it's now often procedure for MERS to convey the mortgage in question to the Trustee, which then goes ahead and records the assignment to the Trustee, and then goes ahead to pursue foreclosure under its name.

Fannie Mae was one of the founders of MERS, and the theory was that MERS could actually execute the foreclosure, but that theory has been rejected by judges in some states.

However the idea that securitization alone clouds ownership is ridiculous. Securitization is not that new, and it has always entailed splitting beneficial interest from legal ownership. In the traditional Fannie type of mortgage, servicing rights were split from the mortgage, and then rights to the stream of payments arising from the mortgage were split from the mortgage.

This novel theory that any transfer of beneficial interest from a property creates a recordable transaction is not going to fly even in PA. It is true that the Montgomery County lawsuit survived the first round in part (civil conspiracy thrown out), but the survival is technical, and if the final court decision were to go in Montgomery County's favor, the resulting chaos would force the state legislature to change their laws - perhaps even their Constitution.

State laws may indeed force an entity wishing to foreclose to legally convey the property from MERS to its own ownership first, and I believe they do in PA and many other states. But state law cannot force a recordation requirement for any change in beneficial interests arising from a mortgage, and that is because parties have legal contractual rights to make such arrangements, and long-standing practice has created a web of such interests that is rather complex and has existed for some time.

Thus, if a change in beneficial ownership (i.e., a right to a part or all of the payment stream arising from a mortgage) were ruled to require recordation, any time a servicer changed a conveyance of the servicing rights would theoretically have to be recorded in Montgomery County, PA. A rather remarkable legal doctrine, that.

And then there is the entire question of the mortgage bonds arising from the pooled mortgages. Would a change in beneficial interest have to be recorded every time a bond was bought or sold? Of course not! No court is going to rule that such is the case.

[Samantha]

37. I believe you misunderstood me

so I will leave it at that.

[Yo_Mama]

31. Okay, but that is about assignments, not mortgages

And in this case ownership is not an issue generally, because the original mortgage or DSD or Trust Deed names MERS (that's the case discussed in the article). Nor are recording fees even relevant, because if MERS always held title to the document, there was no assignment. Instead a right to payment stream was transferred, rather than the more traditional sale of the mortgage and note. Because the original debt was recorded to MERS, MERS may then turn around and assign the note and mortgage to the creditor with the right to the payment stream if that creditor decided to foreclose. There are no missing assignments because there was never a legal need to do them.

Depending on state law and how the documents were originally drawn up, there may be an issue if the debt is not described or the debt is not assigned properly. Nor are all MERS docs done the same way. Some were originally done under a different name, and then assigned to MERS, and in that case if the assignment was not properly made out it may not be recordable now, which could cause a genuine legal issue.

Much of what is written on this subject is rather confused, because it is the right to a payment stream which is commonly sold in a securitization - hence the trustee. The traditional way was for the note and mortgage to be assigned (legally conveyed) to the Trustee, for the recordation of that assignment after the mortgage or DSD or whatever was recorded, and then in the final step of securitization, securities are created that are legal entitlements to a portion of the payment stream from the pool of mortgages held by the trustee.

[Samantha]

35. I thought we were going to end realizing we had a terminology miss!

And it probably was even my fault!

But just want to casually mention MERS was not legally allowed to hold any title. It was only originally intended to be a (might be the wrong word) servicer. The lenders who designed this entity did not want MERS to be able to own anything because then there might be a profit and if so, here's the dreaded word -- taxes would be owed.

In the very beginning of states wanting retribution and putting together class action lawsuits -- and again, I believe among the first to do so was Florida and Kentucky, one of those lawsuits actually traced the -- I am not sure exactly what the right word would be put perhaps I can use origination documents of the program itself -- prohibited MERS from actually owning anything. But the facade of ownership appeared when large lenders started going belly-up and just transferred ownership to MERS anyway.

At that point, when things started to get really ugly, some truly smart DU'er (sorry, I do not remember that person's name) put up a short post to people being foreclosed upon. That post said when the foreclosure was filed, the owner of the property should demand to see the original Note from the transaction. "Show me the note" was the post heading. Because the Note itself is the legal document which does in fact establish a debt, and if the party filing against the homeowner cannot produce the Note, Ooops, as Rick Perry would say, the filing party had no standing in law to foreclose. There were cases reported where judges actually refused to allow the foreclosure to proceed because MERS had no platform from which to file. It was just a mere man in the middle so to speak.

From there, we ricocheted into the arena of the "improvised documents", meaning the ones conjured up and subsequently presented as the originals of the transaction to the courts, at which point the whole thing blew up.

So this was the gist of it, probably with my having a few more skewed words thrown in there. I believe everything you say is correct; however, you do use that word tradition. I would like to suggest that between "then" and "now" tradition has left the building.

Sam

[Yo_Mama]

39. MERS has never been the servicer

Never. MERS has never serviced a mortgage and never will.

MERS has been the "nominee", meaning that it is legally entitled to act for the owner, i.e. it is the entity of record.

Servicing is an entirely different issue.

[ms.smiler]

44. Yo Mama, you are correct, MERS is not a mortgage servicer.

You wrote: “MERS has been the "nominee", meaning that it is legally entitled to act for the owner, i.e. it is the entity of record.”

The definition of “Nominee” is not found in MERS mortgage contracts. So please show me where in law or equity “Nominee” is defined and where in law or equity a “Nominee” derives any authority.

[ZRT2209]

26. is it true you don't need to pay your mortgage if the lender

or purported current lender cannot produce the original Note?

[Yo_Mama]

30. ZRT2209, Most of the time it is untrue

This is actually not a simple question. I will try to explain some of it:

First, you need legal evidence of a debt and a borrower can raise the question over the debt by going to court, even in a non-judicial foreclosure state. It is best practice to incorporate a debt description in the Mortgage or DSD or Deed of Trust, which is signed by the Borrower(s). When recorded this will usually serve as legal evidence of debt. So if the mortgage says that the borrower is obligated to make 360 payments of $1,000 each month on the first of each month, you have no chance of winning in court if you signed the mortgage, haven't made years worth of payments and you are trying to tell the judge you don't owe the money because the creditor can't produce the original paper note. A lawyer won't even take such a case.

However if the mortgage was more complex (variable, etc) there may be issues the borrower could raise to claim that the creditor is trying to collect sums the borrower does not owe, such as that the changing payments were calculated wrong. Or the borrower could raise a claim of fraud, validly or invalidly. It turns out that there were some cases of fraud, generally out on the West Coast with non-English speakers. These are not generally from banks - they were perpetrated, as far as I know, by individuals in the host of private mortgage companies. In some cases they have found two notes, or the borrower has the copy of the note and another note was sent along when the mortgage was sold. That would give the borrower the means to tie up any foreclosure action for a long period, because a mortgage signed fraudulently is not a valid mortgage.

In the case of complex loans, or when a claim of fraud is raised, or when the debt description is not contained in the recorded mortgage, the creditor might need to produce the note if challenged. That's why I prefer to record the note and the mortgage if the loan structure is complex.

Nor does any creditor have to produce the original copy of the note. A valid image is legal evidence, although the borrower could raise the claim in court that the image is not valid, thus forcing the creditor to prove that their imaging system does meet the standards set forth by laws such as Esign.

However there is another issue that can at least delay a foreclosure - that is when the mortgage and note have been conveyed (sold). This often happens several times. If the assignments were not properly done (even if they weren't recorded until later, valid assignments are supposed to be conveyed along with the note/mortgage), then the borrower can raise the legal issue in court of whether THIS creditor has the right to foreclose. This could be a strong delaying argument, but eventually with enough money out there, the creditor will probably straighten out the legal ownership issue in court, and then the defaulted borrower is still going to lose the house.

Generally any creditor can go to court to collect a debt. One does not need the original note in order to collect a debt, and in common law, a debt created without a note can still be collected if there is evidence of the debt that meets the legal standard. If you have equity in the home above the mortgage, a defaulted car loan could result in a lien being placed against your home. From there you could try to claim bankruptcy, of course.

But if there is an issue about either the standing of the creditor or the debt, it may knock the creditor out of the foreclosure process, thus causing the creditor to spend more money to collect the debt. Then you may be able to settle with the creditor for a compromise amount.

Properly recorded documents allow creditors to go to court and use the foreclosure process. If there is a discrepancy in the documents, the creditor may be forced into a more complex legal procedure.

A creditor, if challenged, does have to be able to prove both that the debt is valid and that the creditor is the legal owner/trustee of the debt.

[ZRT2209]

34. wow! thanks!

[pnwmom]

41. MERS probably happened after you left the industry -- or at least, it probably

came to light after you left. They were using MERS to bypass the recording system at the courthouses, in order to aoid taxes, so the transfers didn't appear there.

The reason for the lawsuits is because the banks were ignoring "first to record is first in rights" -- among other things.

[dixiegrrrrl]

9. Actually, to be more specific..

My real estate lady, who sold me my previous house, had sold this house several times before. Not only does she know who owned it, she knows their family and kin. It's a Southern thing.
The local bank owned the mortgage on this house when I bought it.

[sabrina 1]

20. Not if there was a MERS transfer, which is what happened to my friend's mortgage, twice!

[pnwmom]

40. No, that doesn't work for this anymore.

The whole point of MERS is that mortgage holders were circumventing the process by which mortgages and deeds of trust were supposed to be recorded with the localities. They just stopped doing that, so they could stop paying the transfer taxes.

[question everything]

43. I admit, am not familiar with MER

but I hope that it has been discontinued.

It is not just mortgage. Title search can find out if there is a lien on the home so the buyer is not stuck with payments.

Thanks.

[zbdent]

2. Make them make the payments, then ...

[Brigid]

7. Contact a lawyer.

I am sure you can find one that handles foreclosure-related cases.

[FreakinDJ]

8. The Bullshit goes Deep but not the prosecutions

Deeply disappointed they let the Banks buy their way out of that mess and then charge us usury fees to pay it off

[Liberal_in_LA]

12. kick.

[ms.smiler]

18. We are a nation of clouded property Titles because of fraud, securitization and MERS.

I’m assuming the following: you signed a MERS mortgage, the Note was payable to Countrywide, and the Fannie Mae look up tool indicates that they own your loan.

Have you used your MERS MIN in their database?

Is anything recorded in your local land records after the original MERS mortgage?

It’s also important to know if your state is a may record state or a must record state. Many states like my own are must record states and MERS business model does not comply with the laws of those states.

Do you know if MERS even meets the legal definition of Mortgagee in your state? If MERS fails to meet that legal definition, your mortgage contract may lack a necessary party and be void by law.

Please don’t forget that robo-signing not only involved foreclosed properties but also Satisfaction of Mortgages as well.

Fannie, a REMIC has nearly all mortgage loans now although it’s the servicers who pretend to own the loans in the event of foreclosure. The servicers also pretend to own the loans when a loan is refinanced or paid. That is consistent with Fannie’s policies which they appear to believe supersede state law.

[DirkGently]

27. The banks did a lot of crooked stuff -- this isn't really one of them.

Mortgages get assigned all the time. Now, with MERS I think there's an argument that the unrecorded transfers can be confusing, and they shouldn't be able to play as fast and loose as they did.

But generally speaking, there's nothing wrong or crooked with assigning them. Yes, sometimes they end up with the wrong plaintiff name in the lawsuit -- they can freely substitute the plaintiff but sometimes don't bother until the judgment -- but at the end of the day, the party with the note is the one doing the foreclosure.

[Lucinda]

36. Yep. Another here that went from Countrywide to BofA and didn't know

anything about Fannie Mae having it at all until until it recently went to Green Tree.
Luckily, Green Tree seems pretty awesome and is sorting out things AND doing a loan modification that had been requested way back when it first went to BoA.