News about properties and real estate
Take, for instance, last year’s second- biggest foreclosure. There were no headlines when General Electric Credit Corp. took title to Serenoa Golf Club over a $4.3 million debt.
While other courses have had financial difficulties and some, like those at Forest Lakes, have been well publicized, Serenoa is the only golf course in Sarasota County to go through foreclosure since the downturn picked up steam in 2007, according to a Herald-Tribune analysis of government records.
Attorney General Pam Bondi wisely intends to continue the work started by her predecessor to investigate foreclosure malpractice in Florida. Banks, loan servicers and their law firms like to complain that the reason for all the faulty paperwork in foreclosure cases is due to the high volume of cases. In fact, corners often were purposely cut to speed foreclosures through the courts as cheaply and quickly as possible. The result has been widespread deception visited upon Florida courts. Documents were signed with fraudulent signatures; obviously false notarizations were made; and documents were fabricated, including questionable mortgage assignments. And the more the Attorney General’s Office digs, the more dirt it finds.
In a recent presentation titled "Unfair, Deceptive and Unconscionable Acts in Foreclosure Cases," the Attorney General’s Office detailed how foreclosure paperwork was churned out using robo-signers who vouched for the accuracy of mortgage documents without a clue about what they were signing. In one case, the name Linda Green appears on hundreds of thousands of mortgage assignments, and she is listed as an officer of dozens of banks and mortgage companies. But Green’s signature is so different on various documents that it’s clear
The battle for control of the Palm Beach Mall has spilled into the courthouse.
Ever since Simon Property Group let the aging center slip into foreclosure, big-money interests have vied to take control of the 90-acre property along Palm Beach Lakes Boulevard in West Palm Beach.
Doing so has been tricky because the mall property has more than one owner.
via Developers battle in court over control of Palm Beach Mall property.
Selling a condominium in this troubled market hardly needed to get any more difficult.
But that’s exactly what could happen to scores of Tampa Bay area condo owners looking to sell or refinance with Federal Housing Administration mortgages.
The FHA — which insures mortgage loans, among other things — has new eligibility rules that condo buildings must follow before any individual unit owners can sell or refinance.
After a brief respite, the foreclosure storm is again raining down on Volusia and Flagler counties.
December saw an enormous increase in foreclosure activity compared with the previous month, and both counties rank in the top five in foreclosure rates in Florida. Monthly activity — default notices, auctions and repossessions — increased almost 240 percent in Flagler and more than 86 percent in Volusia. Flagler, for example, had 113 foreclosure auctions in December, and only 8 a month before.
U.S. Bancorp and Wells Fargo & Co. lost a foreclosure case in Massachusetts’ highest court Friday that will guide lower courts in that state and may influence others in the clash between bank practices and state real-estate law. The ruling drove down bank stocks.
The state Supreme Judicial Court upheld a judge’s decision saying two foreclosures were invalid because the banks didn’t prove they owned the mortgages, which he said were transferred into two mortgage-backed trusts without the recipients’ being named.
Joshua Rosner, an analyst at the New York-based research firm Graham Fisher & Co., called the decision “a landmark ruling” showing that at least in Massachusetts a mortgage “must name the assignee to be valid.”