Here we go again.
Florida has become one of the states with the biggest numbers of homes both in foreclosure and eviction. Turns out there's a small data company behind a sizable majority of those cases, a company nobody's ever heard of up to now. And they want those damn houses.
Judge Walt Logan had seen enough. As a county judge in Florida, he had 28 cases pending in which an entity called MERS wanted to foreclose on homeowners even though it had never lent them any money.
MERS, a tiny data-management company, claimed the right to foreclose, but would not explain how it came to possess the mortgage notes originally issued by banks. Judge Logan summoned a MERS lawyer to the Pinellas County courthouse and insisted that that fundamental question be answered before he permitted the drastic step of seizing someone’s home.
“You don’t think that’s reasonable?” the judge asked.
“I don’t,” the lawyer replied. “And in fact, not only do I think it’s not reasonable, often that’s going to be impossible.”
Judge Logan had entered the murky realm of MERS.
(emphasis added)
Basically, the shabby mortgage scams of the past decade needed a holding company to shift all those sold and the resold and then resold again mortages. That made things convenient for the banks, which never had to track the titles or pay all those pesky public fees.
Although the average person has never heard of it, MERS — short for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems — holds 60 million mortgages on American homes, through a legal maneuver that has saved banks more than $1 billion over the last decade but made life maddeningly difficult for some troubled homeowners.
Created by lenders seeking to save millions of dollars on paperwork and public recording fees every time a loan changes hands, MERS is a confidential computer registry for trading mortgage loans. From an office in the Washington suburbs, it played an integral, if unsung, role in the proliferation of mortgage-backed securities that fueled the housing boom. But with the collapse of the housing market, the name of MERS has been popping up on foreclosure notices and on court dockets across the country, raising many questions about the way this controversial but legal process obscures the tortuous paths of mortgage ownership.
Obscures it so completely that a MERS lawyer could stand in front of a judge and coolly tell him that his desire to follow the law was unreasonable and he'd just better get over the whole thing. That may be the real point that MERS used to sell its services: the banks could avoid paying fees, yes, but they could also avoid all accountability.
In the last few years, banks have initiated tens of thousands of foreclosures in the name of MERS — about 13,000 in the New York region alone since 2005 — confounding homeowners seeking relief directly from lenders and judges trying to help borrowers untangle loan ownership. What is more, the way MERS obscures loan ownership makes it difficult for communities to identify predatory lenders whose practices led to the high foreclosure rates that have blighted some neighborhoods.
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“I’m convinced that part of the scheme here is to exhaust the resources of consumers and their advocates,” said Marie McDonnell, a mortgage analyst in Orleans, Mass., who is a consultant for lawyers suing lenders. “This system removes transparency over what’s happening to these mortgage obligations and sows confusion, which can only benefit the banks.”
Good only as long as judges like Logan buy the MERS argument that they'll never get it untangled and the best thing to do is let MERS foreclose those properties just as if they actually owned them, a game of "Let's Pretend" that makes a mockery of the very property law these predators claim are so sacred when it's a matter of them getting paid. Not so sacred when those laws get in the way of their being paid.
You want a place to start redressing the one-way law under conservatives? Start applying the property law fairly to both sides. Force the banks, force MERS, to prove they have title to a property before they can foreclose on it or evict the current owner. If they can't, fuck em.
No more one-way law.
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