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Housing Thu Apr 07 2011
Cook County Court Halts 1,700 Foreclosures
If you've read Christopher Gray's great piece on aggressive home foreclosures over there in the featured column, then you've got a sense of what unscrupulous lenders were doing to grow their business.
Check out this admission from a foreclosure firm in this Tribune piece on a court's decision to halt 1,700 foreclosures because mortgage lenders' counsel were adding pages to affidavits and then re-attaching signature pages, i.e., lying about what customers had agreed to.
The admission to the court by Fisher and Shapiro does not involve rubber-stamping of documents but rather removing the signature page, altering the affidavit's content and reattaching the signature page, the court said.
The changed contents included the addition of attorneys' fees, insurance costs, preservation costs, inspection costs and taxes on the property, costs that may have been incurred before or after the servicer signed the original affidavit, [Judge] Jacobius said in his order dated March 2.
The firm's admission signals a note of caution to purchasers of distressed homes, which represent about 50 percent of local home sales, because of potential lingering legal issues if the title transfer process was faulty.
This would be shocking if it had happened in a few dozen cases, considering the immense financial and personal impact on the families involved. That it has been discovered in this many cases, in one place, is simply unconscionable and tells us something about just how easily powerful financial institutions can ladle burdens on working families dependent on them. Now check out that last sentence! Fifty percent of local home sales may be disturbed by unquieted titles. What a mess.