Hat tip to SD Squatter and Nick for sending in this article about deadbeats getting their house for free – we knew it would come to this!
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/business/foreclosure-to-home-free-as-5-year-clock-expires.html
An excerpt:
In September, Susan Rodolfi, celebrated an unusual anniversary: five years of missed mortgage payments.
She is like a ghost of the housing market’s painful past, one of thousands of Americans who have skipped years of mortgage payments and are still living in their homes.
Now a legal quirk could bring a surreal ending to her foreclosure case and many others around the country: They may get to keep their homes without ever having to pay another dime.
The reason, lawyers for homeowners will argue, is that cases have dragged on too long.
Read full article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/30/business/foreclosure-to-home-free-as-5-year-clock-expires.html
THIS may backfire on those so called deadbeats, thus fasttracking the remaining foreclosures. Gxx knows we could use the inventory
We sure could – but these court delays don’t apply in California.
Here the banks are willfully not foreclosing until a property has enough equity that makes it worth their while.
This is another one of those stories where you read the lead and say “what? this is outrageous! oh, hold on… it’s Florida.”
“hold on… It’s Florida” LOL
I found the comments in the NY Times article interesting. Over 640 folks chimed in. Me? All I can think of is the “Tan Man” from Countrywide. Thousands lost their jobs, he gave favors of “VIP” mortgage rates to his favorite congressmen, and gets fined $45 million. Bank of America–which took over Countrywide–pays off $30 million of that fine–and he’s left with only $15 million to pay.
Yep, $15 million is a lot of money for the vast majority of us, but to him it wasn’t really even a slap on the wrist. And to think years and years later, he’s off somewhere still working on his tan, and we’re still reading articles like this… *Sigh*
At the end, he was selling $17 million in Countrywide stock….per week!
Banks got bailed out. Only a tiny % of people went to jail. Essentially none to speak of.
Some homeowners (renters?) got in way over their heads. But there is NO excusing the gangster criminal practices of Wall St. (securitization), the banks (no doc loans) & the loan service companies.
All of the pre crash stuff is still going on, just on a much smaller scale.
Have we learned our lessons? I don’t think so. Some want to return to those wild west days of flipping, inflating good times.
Securitizing homes loans should be a crime. Any company that provides a loan should have to keep it for at least half the life of the loan. We need to return to a practice where homes are places people buy to live in.
If we did that, the market would slow down. 97% of realtors would be out of a job, but the JimTheRealtors and those who aspire to that level of practice would still have one AND be able to prosper at it.
Anyone out to buy a home would be MUCH better off throughout the entire process.
Here here!
I could be wrong, but I don’t think there are a lot of flippers in SD buying million dollar coastal tract homes to flip at this point.
(or investors planning on renting them out).
Maybe some lower end condo’s etc…
The foreclosure laws have been the same for hundreds of years and they never should have changed in this down turn. It’s incredibly simple. You sign a note when you get a mortgage promising to pay it back. If you don’t, in 3-4 mos the property should be auctioned so the investor that lent the money can get paid back and the owner should go back to renting. It is no different then when you don’t make your car payment, it gets re-possessed. It is a huge shame that mostly liberals screwed up a fine process that worked well for hundreds of years. And I say this being a social liberal. It’s allowed deadbeats to be protected and coddled in out society where those that pay their bills get the shaft and get no breaks.
Of course foreclosure is always at the option of the bank. If the bank thinks that not foreclosing and letting the “owner” stay that is their option. Now as market conditions change the economics could change as well. But of course the question is does the statute of limitations on regular debt apply (depends on the state).
These type of things boil down to numbers IMO.
If they (press for)/processed all loans in default maybe they calculated that their loses would have been far worse, due to further depressed home prices.
I have thought that is why some higher end regions seem to have a lot more default loans not foreclosed.
It’s a Numbers game.
It certainly does seem like those of us that are frugal and pay ALL of our debts, with interest, get the shaft instead of a bailout.
While I don’t want to see thousands of families thrown out into the streets, there should still be some level of responsibility assigned to the borrower, as well as the lender and their own shenanigans.