Hat tip to daytrip and geotpf for sending this along, from the WSJ:
OKEECHOBEE COUNTY, Fla.—Patsy Campbell could tell you a thing or two about fighting foreclosure. She’s been fighting hers for 25 years.
The 71-year-old retired insurance saleswoman has been living in her house, a two-story on a half acre in a tidy middle-class neighborhood here in central Florida, since 1978. The last time she made a mortgage payment was October 1985.
And yet Ms. Campbell has been able to keep her house, protected by a 105-pound pit bull named Dodger and a locked, rusty gate advising visitors to beware of the dog.
“They’re not going to take this house,” says Ms. Campbell. “I intend to stay in this house and maintain it as my residence until I die.”
Ms. Campbell’s foreclosure case has outlasted two marriages, three recessions and four presidents. She has seen seven great-grandchildren born, plum real-estate markets come and go and the ownership of her mortgage change six times. Many Florida real-estate lawyers say it is the longest-lasting foreclosure case they have ever heard of.
The story of how Ms. Campbell has managed to avoid both paying her mortgage and losing her home, which is currently assessed at more than $203,000, is a cautionary tale for lenders that cut corners and followed sloppy practices when originating, processing and servicing mortgages. Lenders are especially vulnerable in the 23 states, including Florida, that require foreclosures to be approved by a judge.
Ms. Campbell has challenged her foreclosure on the grounds that her mortgage was improperly transferred between banks and federal agencies, that lawyers for the bank had waited too long to prosecute the case, that a Florida law shields her from all her creditors, and for dozens of other reasons. Once, she questioned whether there really was a debt at all, saying the lender improperly separated the note from the mortgage contract.
She has managed to stave off the banks partly because several courts have recognized that some of her legal arguments have some merit—however minor. Two foreclosure actions against her, for example, were thrown out because her lender sat on its hands too long after filing a case and lost its window to foreclose.
Ms. Campbell, who is handling her case these days without a lawyer, has learned how to work the ropes of the legal system so well that she has met every attempt by a lender to repossess her home with multiple appeals and counteractions, burying the plaintiffs facing her under piles of paperwork.
She offers no apologies for not paying her mortgage for 25 years, saying that when a foreclosure is in dispute, borrowers are entitled to stop making payments until the courts resolve the matter.
“This is every lender’s nightmare,” says Robert Summers, a Stuart, Fla., real-estate lawyer who represents Commercial Services of Perry, an Iowa-based buyer of distressed debt that currently owns Ms. Campbell’s mortgage and has been trying to foreclose. “Someone defending a foreclosure action can raise defenses that are baseless, but are obstacles for the foreclosing lender,” he says, calling the system “an unfair burden” for lenders.
Deadbeat. Now an old, cranky deadbeat. Imagine the personal expense as a result of being chased by banks all your life.
If Bankgate from Wikileaks doesn’t tumble bank equity, this kind of resistance WOULD!
#1 is right. Hire her JTR!!!
Some people have all the luck. Here dogie dogie….nice dogie dogie.
What a way to spend your life.
I guess I have a slightly different take — just how incompetent are the banks and lawyers if they can’t beat one old woman for 25 years?
At this point, her rabid dog should be shot and she needs to be pulled from her home kicking and screaming and thrown out on the street. No sympathy for her since she’s gotten a 25 yr free ride. Imagine how her neighbors must hate her and can’t wait for her to get the heck out of the neighborhood so her eyesore of a property can be torn down.
Bill M., you are against an orderly society, huh? People can just be yanked out of their houses without cause? Yeah, sure, she hasn’t made any payments in a long time, but if the banks are too stupid to manage their own portfolio, who’s fault is that?
Former RB, Please tell us you are joking. Dang right she should be “yanked out”. The deadbeat is tooling the system to get free rent. Period. Imagine you were her neighbor, working your a** off to manage finances, doing the yard work every weekend, etc and this deadbeat just sits there laughing….
Great story, I have no sympathy for the lenders and or banks, they deserve what they get until they learn how to do business the honest way themselves.Right now they are acting like thugs, especially BOA.
Nope, not joking at all. Without a rule of law, we are no better than North Korea or any other police state. Yes, the woman’s behavior is pretty bad, but better 1000 old ladies stiff the banks than one person get foreclosed on incorrectly.
It’s people like this old hag that make all of our taxes(income, mortgage and property taxes) go up. I agree that the banks who kept dropping the ball were also at fault (especially since they should have been able to figure out her game after 25yrs). But if everyone who truely should be foreclosed upon was able to stave off the banks then no one else who actually qualifies for a mortgage that they can afford would be able to get one.
This is no different than robbing someone of their life savings and stalling until the statue of limitations runs out.
What is really outlandish Former RB is that the mortgage changed hands so many times – seemingly from 1 inept lender to another. And do I think they would actually yank her out of her house? No. It is still America. She just waits by the mailbox for the next foreclosure notice so she can mail a 2-inch thick barrage of legal loopholes with just the slightest change in wording from the previous 2-inch stack of BS. I hope the current mortgage holder gets it right so she can terrorize her daughter’s house with Aqua Net and dog poop. 🙂
@BillM, yes, that’s the price we pay for living in an orderly society. Taxes are low in Saudi Arabia, but justice is delivered in a brutish manner.
But, you’re right, the real story here is the seeming idiocy of the lenders. You know the old yarn about a “mortgage burning” after you’ve paid it off? Don’t count on today’s lenders being able to locate the documents for to set ablaze. I’m not terribly sympathetic to her, but someone would have to try really hard to make me feel anything but schadenfreude towards the bank.
@sdbri, except that they are in litigation to get her out, so the SOL isn’t a problem.