PRIORITY OF LIENS: TWISTED TAIL OF TITLE FRAUD

THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT CASE LAW IN VARIOUS CASES REPORTED IN THIS BLOG SHOWS THAT WHEN ONE INSTITUTION CONFRONTS ANOTHER, THE APPARENTLY INFERIOR LIEN BECOMES EITHER SUPERIOR, OR THE ONLY LIEN. CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATIONS, HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS TAKE NOTE: YOUR LIEN MIGHT BE WORTH THE ENTIRE HOUSE IF YOU FILE FOR A DECLARATORY ACTION RAISING THE PRIORITY OF YOUR LIEN. HELOC AND SECOND MORTGAGE HOLDERS TAKE NOTE AS WELL. AND OF COURSE HOMEOWNERS OR THOSE WHO THINK THEY ARE EX-HOMEOWNERS TAKE NOTE: YOU MIGHT STILL HAVE THE RIGHT TO BRING A QUIET TITLE ACTION AND RECLAIM YOUR PROPERTY — ALLOWING ANY ACTUAL “LOSER” IN THE DEAL TO MAKE THEIR CLAIM BUT BARRING NOMINAL PARTIES FROM WINDFALL PROFITS IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY RISK OR INVESTMENT.

There is practically nobody left who doesn’t see that the “ownership” of the loan is a big red question mark. The question that is unresolved is whether that is relevant to questions of title and foreclosure sales. Here is the issue: In most cases the title record (the official title records books located in the property clerk’s office) show only one “party” to the note (a company identified as a lender) and one “party” to the security instrument — the mortgage or Deed of Trust — (a company identified as the mortgagee or beneficiary most frequently MERS or some other straw man or nominee).

So the first problem is that from the start, the ownership of the note and the ownership of the mortgage are split intentionally by the parties who engineered the “loan” closing. With the exception of a few states where the big banks lobbied for corrective legislation that probably is unenforceable or unconstitutional, it is not possible to enforce a mortgage that is not incident to a note. Each state has adopted the Uniform Commercial Code and its own property laws that make it impossible for one person to get the house and another to get a monetary judgment for the note —- both based upon the same obligation.

• They must be the same person or there is no enforcement of the security instrument (i.e., no foreclosure). And in those states, the mortgage or deed of trust is not incident to the note unless they have a common “owner.” So even before we get to the issue of securitization of the receivable, we have a problem. There is basically no law that would allow foreclosure of a so-called mortgage or deed of trust in which the holder of the mortgage or deed of trust is different than the holder of the note.

Before we get to the securitization issue, there is one more factor that is covered by Reg Z and the Truth in Lending Act. It is whether the “loan” was table funded. A table funded loan is one in which the party identified as a lender was not the source of the money in the transaction. The prohibition and restriction against these transactions is meant to keep the consumer informed about the identity of the party with whom he/she is doing business and therefore able to decide whether in fact they want to do business with the party who is really funding the loan.

• The title problem with a table-funded loan is obvious: the note is supposedly a description of the obligation that arises when the borrower accepts the benefits of the monetary advance from the source of funds. In a table funded loan, the note does NOT describe the real parties and therefore is not proper evidence of the obligation and thus cannot be used as a substitute for proof of the obligation.
• Federal law and rules state that anyone who as a matter of practice is doing table-funded loans, is defined as a predatory lender.
  
• This means that if someone wants to enforce the obligation, they must have more than the note to prove their case. This is precisely where the pretender lenders are finessing the courts — because before the antics of the last decade, there was no difference between the obligation and the note and everyone on both sides of even an adversary proceeding usually agreed that the original note was proper evidence of the obligation.
• This also means that if someone wants to foreclose, they need something more than the note, because the note, as we have seen, is NOT the complete evidence of the obligation — there is another party involved who was undisclosed and who was the source of the funds. So the obligation was between the borrower and the source of the funds. But the borrower was not told or informed that the money being advanced was from another entity.
  
• Ordinarily this would not present a major problem, but it still would require corrective action in order to clear title for  purposes of a satisfaction or release of the mortgage or deed of trust, refinance, sale, second mortgage, condominium association lien, homeowner association lien, HELOC, non-judicial sale or judicial sale. Without this corrective action ON RECORD at the county recorder’s office, the documents releasing or transferring title to the property would be fatally defective in that the real party who advanced the funds did not execute a release or satisfaction, leaving the borrower or the borrower’s successor with the exposure of yet another foreclosure or another claim on the original obligation. This defect is either suspect or apparent on its face when you see MERS involved or an “originating Lender” that is not a bank (and usually out of business now).
  

All of this mind-numbing analysis morphs from nitpicking to highly relevant when securitization enters the picture. Securitization as it was used in actual practice, i.e., real world reality, was simply a process by which the payments were split from the obligation, not the note and reframed as the basis for a third party obligation under the terms of a mortgage bond sold to third party investors. So the source of funding never receives the note or any of the borrower’s closing documents. He receives a mortgage bond in which there are multiple payors, obligors, and contingent liabilities only one of which is the borrower’s obligation to repay the obligation.

There are two primary defects in this process that are of high significance:

1. In practice, the intermediaries used the documentation for securitization to multiply rather than split the obligation to pay amongst the various payors and co-obligors.
   

• This means that for every dollar that was advanced for the benefit of the borrower, an obligation was ADDED to the receivable stream for each payor or co-obligor that was ADDED to the obligation to make payments under the mortgage bond. This is where the intermediaries began to make multiples of the money being funded rather than small basis points as was customary in the industry.
  
• Through the use of highly sophisticated cloaked transactions, each dollar funded was multiplied as a nominal receivable which in turn was sold multiple times and insured multiple times in multiple ways.
  
• Hence the the total evidence of the borrower’s obligation consists of the closing borrower documents PLUS the closing investor documents. The total accounting consists of the the servicing record of the borrower’s payments PLUS the distribution and tape record of reports and payments to the bond holders.
  
• This totality of the evidence reveals that the borrower’s obligation resulted in multiple payments by multiple payors and co-obligors, some of whom made money participating in the sham scheme, and some of whom lost money in the scheme.
  
• In most cases, one of the groups that lost money were the original investors who advanced money for their share of the flow of receivables described in the mortgage bond, which included, at all times, the receivables due from third party payors and co-obligors. Other losers were traders and institutions that were creating the appearance of an unregulated but phantom securities market in which profits and losses were apparently made on a daily basis, but which in fact were all accounting entries much like the Madoff scheme.
  
• The current foreclosure scheme ignores these factors enabling intermediaries dubbed “pretender lenders” to profit from the confusion by pretending to be lenders when in fact they were never lenders of record and never lenders in the sense that they ever advanced any money. The intermediaries are filing false, fabricated and even forged or back-dated affidavits in the name of “Trustees” for trusts that do not exist or which have been dissolved or paid in whole or in part. The lender having been paid or settled as to the obligation under the mortgage bond thus releases any further claim. The intermediaries profit by pocketing the multiples of payments received, and the borrower suffers from the loss of a home or enforcement of a note that was never the evidence of the obligation.
  

2. In practice, the actual source of funding — the party who advanced funds and who received a mortgage bond instead of the evidence of the borrower’s obligation —- NEVER held the note and was never intended to hold the note — and NEVER was the mortgagee or beneficiary and never was intended to be the mortgagee or beneficiary. Thus a declaratory action against the mortgagee or beneficiary of record should succeed in raising the priority of the interest of the plaintiff above that of the record holder of the security instrument, since the record holder has no obligation owed to it, and never was intended to be the recipient of funds nor to have the right or capacity to foreclose on the loan.
   

THE BOTTOM LINE IS THAT CASE LAW IN VARIOUS CASES REPORTED IN THIS BLOG SHOWS THAT WHEN ONE INSTITUTION CONFRONTS ANOTHER, THE APPARENTLY INFERIOR LIEN BECOMES EITHER SUPERIOR, OR THE ONLY LIEN. CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATIONS, HOMEOWNER ASSOCIATIONS TAKE NOTE: YOUR LIEN MIGHT BE WORTH THE ENTIRE HOUSE IF YOU FILE FOR A DECLARATORY ACTION RAISING THE PRIORITY OF YOUR LIEN. HELOC AND SECOND MORTGAGE HOLDERS TAKE NOTE AS WELL. AND OF COURSE HOMEOWNERS OR THOSE WHO THINK THEY ARE EX-HOMEOWNERS TAKE NOTE: YOU MIGHT STILL HAVE THE RIGHT TO BRING A QUIET TITLE ACTION AND RECLAIM YOUR PROPERTY — ALLOWING ANY ACTUAL “LOSER” IN THE DEAL TO MAKE THEIR CLAIM BUT BARRING NOMINAL PARTIES FROM WINDFALL PROFITS IN THE ABSENCE OF ANY RISK OR INVESTMENT.

Tags: ASSOCIATION LIEN, HELOC, PRIORITY OF LIENS, Reg Z, SECOND MORTGAGE, table funded loans, truth in lending, UCC
Posted in bubble, Corruption, Eviction, evidence, expert witness, foreclosure mill, Modification, Motions, Pleading, securities fraud, Servicer |