A great deal has been written in the last year or so about cases in which a court has denied a lender the right to foreclose on a mortgaged house. Lately many of the decisions have involved MERS, an acronym for the nationwide Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. This post focuses on two August decisions in which the courts decided MERS should be able to foreclose, despite vigorous legal efforts by the homeowners.
Bucci vs. Lehman Brothers
This is a trial court decision from Rhode Island. The homeowners stopped making mortgage payments in September of 2008, the lender sent a notice of non-judicial foreclosure sale the following March. After slight delays the foreclosure sale ended up being scheduled in July. So lesson number one from this case is that you can’t necessarily count on staying in your house for years if you stop paying the mortgage. The amount of time to foreclosure will vary a great deal depending on the lender and the state you live in.