According to these two articles, this foreclosure proceeding has been going on since the owner, Joe Lents, stopped paying on his mortgage back in 2002!
He doesn't dispute owing the money, he claims he just wants to be sure he's paying it to the rightful Lender.
Defending himself has, so far, cost more the $120,000. But he's still winning the cases, or at least delaying a negative outcome.
He was a retired CPA leading a software company that was charged by the SEC with a "pump-and-dump" scheme - in which he lost money. As a result of that charge, he lost his job and subsequently could no longer pay the mortgage on his recently-refinanced $1.5M home.
He claims he tried to work with WaMu (which was servicing the loan) and his mortgage brokerage firm (which found him the loan), but they both told him there was nothing they could do since the loan had been sold. At the beginning of 2003 WaMu filed for foreclosure.
As a CPA he noticed something curious about the filing; it said the promissory note was lost. But during the trial the employee who had signed the statement that it was lost admitted that it had not been looked for, she had merely signed a stack of affidavits that were put on her desk.
What's really amazing, and outrageous is the attitude of the attorney(s) representing the financial institutions. One of them is quoted as saying, "Requiring banks to produce the paperwork at a foreclosure hearing is a nuisance... It's a gigantic waste of time. The mortgage may have transferred five, six, eight times. It's possible that you don't have all the pieces of paper, but it was enough to convince the next guy in the chain. There's no true controversy over whether the owner owns the loan."
Excuse me, but if you can't document who owns the loan, how is that different from a borrower having to document income or assets when called upon to do so? Should borrowers now start objecting to having to document income and assets on the grounds that it's "a nuisance" and "a gigantic waste of time?"
If this is more common than just an isolated case, as the articles seem to indicate, then I believe things may get a lot tougher in the lending industry before they get easier. Either the Lenders will all need to quickly get their act(s) together and FIND all their paperwork, or they're going to be in for even more heavy losses. And that will have a far-reaching impact on the rest of the market for quite a while to come.
Hopefully they get their act(s) together and dig up their paperwork. Surely, someone can come up with a system to track papers!
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