CNBC has an article out - in it, two Professors Explain WHY MERS Banks/Servicers have NO Right to Foreclose!
Portion:
Mr. Peterson, in a paper with the dry title of “Two Faces: Demystifying the Mortgage Electronic Registration System’s Land Title Theory,” argues that MERS cannot have it both ways, and that it faces problems if it is deemed to be only one of them.
If it is an agent, he wrote, “it is extremely unclear that it has the right to list itself as a mortgagee,” as it does. State real estate laws, he said, “do not have provisions authorizing financial institutions to use the name of a shell company,” in large part because “the point of these statutes is to provide a transparent, reliable record of actual — as opposed to nominal — land ownership.”
If it is a mortgagee, Mr. Peterson added, it has the right to record mortgages in its own name, as it did. But since it does not own the actual loan, doing that could be seen as violating a long line of precedents that bar separating a mortgage from the underlying note in which the borrower promises to pay. He quotes from an 1879 Supreme Court decision holding that “the assignment of the note carries the mortgage with it, while an assignment of the latter alone is a nullity.”
If an assignment of the mortgage alone is a nullity, then the mortgage can no longer be enforced. The borrower would still owe the money, but no foreclosure would be possible and the borrower could sell the home without paying off the mortgage. The lender could sue the borrower, but collecting money from distressed former homeowners might be very difficult in many cases.
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