Who holds the deed to your house?

You have probably heard of the moratorium on home foreclosures due to sloppy paperwork in the mortgage industry. But there is potentially a far bigger problem, one that may affect your own paid-up mortgage. A court in Kansas has ruled that the old practice of registering titles to property in the local courthouse is, in fact, the law of the land. This was largely ignored during the mortgage book, with its high-tech mortgage repackaging and speculating. Let’s let the New York Times explain it:

For centuries, when a property changed hands, the transaction was submitted to county clerks who recorded it and filed it away. These records ensured that the history of a property’s ownership was complete and that the priority of multiple liens placed on the property — a mortgage and a home equity loan, for example — was accurate.

During the mortgage lending spree, however, home loans changed hands constantly. Those that ended up packaged inside of mortgage pools, for instance, were often involved in a dizzying series of transactions.

To avoid the costs and complexity of tracking all these exchanges, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the mortgage industry set up MERS to record loan assignments electronically. This company didn’t own the mortgages it registered, but it was listed in public records either as a nominee for the actual owner of the note or as the original mortgage holder.

Cost savings to members who joined the registry were meaningful. In 2007, the organization calculated that it had saved the industry $1 billion during the previous decade. Some 60 million loans are registered in the name of MERS.

As long as real estate prices rose, this system ran smoothly. When that trajectory stopped, however, foreclosures brought against delinquent borrowers began flooding the nation’s courts. MERS filed many of them.

“MERS is basically an electronic phone book for mortgages,” said Kevin Byers, an expert on mortgage securities and a principal at Parkside Associates, a consulting firm in Atlanta. “To call this electronic registry a creditor in foreclosure and bankruptcy actions is legal pretzel logic, nothing more than an artifice constructed to save time, money and paperwork.”

The system also led to confusion. When MERS was involved, borrowers who hoped to work out their loans couldn’t identify who they should turn to.

As cases filed by MERS grew, lawyers representing troubled borrowers began questioning how an electronic registry with no ownership claims had the right to evict people. April Charney, a consumer lawyer at Jacksonville Area Legal Aid in Florida, was among the first to argue that MERS, which didn’t own the note or the mortgage, could not move against a borrower.

Initially, judges rejected those arguments and allowed MERS foreclosures to proceed. Recently, however, MERS has begun losing some cases, and the Kansas ruling is a pivotal loss, experts say.

While the matter before the Kansas Supreme Court didn’t involve an action that MERS took against a borrower, the registry’s legal standing is still central to the ruling.

via Fair Game – The Mortgage Machine Backfires – NYTimes.com.

Now factor in this from the Washington Post:

The federal government’s pressure on lenders Wednesday to fix the paperwork problems plaguing foreclosures left unaddressed a far greater potential threat facing the financial system and the U.S. economy.

Financial and legal analysts are divided over how the ownership questions will be resolved and the scope of the potential damage. Lenders and investigators are in the midst of a painstaking process of unraveling the complex chain of loans that were sold from one party to another, a process that some analysts say could take years.

Of the nearly $11 trillion in mortgages in the United States, about two-thirds was turned into securities that were traded around the globe.

After a home buyer gets a mortgage, the lender typically pools that loan with hundreds of others to create a security that can be traded like a stock. This process is commonly called securitization and has been the preferred method of financing debt in America for more than a decade.

Wall Street firms would set up partnerships called “trusts” and would raise money from pension funds, university endowments, hedge funds and other investors to buy these mortgage securities. The investors would then share the cash flow from the payments made by homeowners every month.

However, local laws in most states dictate that each time a mortgage changes hands, the transaction needs to be recorded in courts or county offices. But the speed with which the loans were being generated during the housing boom and then pooled together and passed around Wall Street meant that big financial firms took shortcuts, consumer lawyers said.

Often the proper paperwork got lost or was passed along without being filled out, lawyers say. Some documents have been found retroactively signed or even forged.

“It now appears that in many cases: 1. the paperwork was not properly transferred and 2. it is unclear in many cases where the actual paperwork actually rests today,” Citigroup Global Markets analyst Josh Levin wrote in a note to investors this week.

Some think this can be fixed easily; others think it might paralyze the housing industry and bring down banks, investors, and the financial system.

Titles are a legal bulwark of private property. What we often dismissed as “mere paperwork” can be profoundly important. Or do you think physical titles and the like are obsolete in the age of internet transactions? But even if we need to adjust the system to the new technology, how do we get from here to there without going through an economic mess? And, in the meantime, who holds the deed to your house?

HT:  FWS