The Consumer Warning Network website offers an advice that homeowners can put pressure on lenders who refuse to cooperate with homeowners willing to keep their homes and instead lenders choose to foreclose on the house.
According to The Consumer Warning Network, homeowners who believe they have been treated unfairly can fight back by using the “Produce the Note” strategy .
NOTE: In some states, a lender can foreclose on a home without going to court. These are called non-judicial foreclosure states. Homeowner can still use the “Produce the Note” strategy in these states, but it takes a few more steps on homeowner’s part.
The logic and the legal defense behind the “Produce the Note” strategy is to make certain the financial institution attempting to foreclose on the house is, in fact, the owner of the note. There is ONLY one original note for the mortgage that has the homeowner’s signature on it which proves that the homeowner owes the debt.
During the lending boom, most mortgages were flipped and sold to another lender or servicer or sliced up and sold to investors as securitized packages on Wall Street. In the rush to turn these loans over as fast as possible to make the most money, many of the new lenders did not get the proper paperwork to show they own the note and mortgage. This is the key to the “Produce the Note” strategy. Now, many lenders are moving to foreclose on homeowners, resulting in part from problems they created, and don’t have the proper paperwork to prove they have a right to foreclose.
It’s important to hold lenders accountable for their carelessness. Home is the biggest asset in many people’s life.
When the homeowner gets a copy of the foreclosure suit, many lenders now automatically include a count to re-establish the note that reads like this: “…the Mortgage note has either been lost or destroyed and the Plaintiff is unable to state the manner in which this occurred.”
In other words, the lenders are admitting they don’t have the note that proves they have a right to foreclose.
This is extremely important because if the lender is allowed to proceed without that proof, there is a possibility another institution, which may have bought your note along the way, will also try to collect the same debt from you again.
A Tennessee borrower recently had precisely that happen to her. Her lender, Ameriquest, foreclosed on her in July of 2007. About three months later, another bank sent her a default notice for the mortgage on the house she just lost. She called to find out what was going on. After being transferred from place to place and left on hold for lengthy periods of time, no one could explain what happened. They said they would get back to her, but never did. Now, she faces the risk of having her credit continually damaged for a debt she no longer owes.
The primary goal of the “Produce the Note” strategy is to delay the foreclosure and put pressure on the lender to negotiate. Only about 20% of short sales are approved by the lenders, most become foreclosures. Despite all the hype about lenders wanting to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, most borrowers know that’s not the reality.
Too many homeowners have experienced lender resistance to their efforts to work out a payment structure to keep them in their homes. Many lenders bear responsibility for these defaults, because they put borrowers into unfair loans using deceptive, hard-sell practices and then made the problem worse with predatory servicing.
Lenders made incredible amounts of money by using irresponsible practices to issue and service these loans. That greed led to the foreclosure crisis we’re in today. Allowing lenders to continue foreclosing on home after home, destroying our neighborhoods and our economy hurts us all.
With the help of judges who see through these predatory practices, lenders will feel the pressure to work with borrowers to keep them in their homes.
For more details and to watch the videos, visit:
http://www.consumerwarningnetwork.com/2009/05/12/fight-foreclosure-make-em-produce-the-note-3/
NOTE: For legal advice contact your real estate attorney.
SOURCE: The Consumer Warning Network
