Ironically on the same day Bank of American is about to sign a historic $8.5 Billion settlement agreement over bad mortgages, somebody finally went through a registry of deeds to look at the effect of the U.S. Bank v. Ibanez decision and the validity of mortgage assignments in Massachusetts. This just came in off the Housing Wire and is scorching through the real estate newswires.
Audit Shows 75% of Mortgage Assignment Are Invalid In Mass. County
According to an audit performed by McDonnell Property Analytics, in the Salem, Mass. Registry of Deeds, 75% of mortgage assignments are “invalid.” About 27% of invalid assignments are fraudulent, McDonnell said, while 35% are robo-signed and 10% violate the Massachusetts Mortgage Fraud Statute.
McDonnell said it could only determine the financial institution that owned the mortgage in 60% of the cases reviewed. There are 683 missing assignments for the 287 traced mortgages, representing about $180,000 in lost recording fees.
“What this means is that the degradation in standards of commerce by which the banks originated, sold and securitized these mortgages are so fatally flawed that the institutions, including many pension funds, that purchased these mortgages don’t actually own them,” according to analysts at McDonnell. “The assignments of mortgage were never prepared, executed and delivered to them in the normal course of business at the time of the transaction.”
John O’Brien, register of deeds for Essex County in the northeastern corner of Massachusetts, urged state attorneys general for a third time to cease settlement talks with the nation’s largest servicers. In May, O’Brien sent a letter to Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller for this same purpose.
“My registry is a crime scene as evidenced by this forensic examination,” said O’Brien. “This evidence has made it clear to me that the only way we can ever determine the total economic loss and the amount damage done to the taxpayers is by conducting a full forensic audit of all registry of deeds in Massachusetts.”
Is This Audit Flawed Though?
Now, a few observations about this “audit.”
First, McDonnell Property Analytics is a company engaged in the business of stopping or delaying foreclosures and performing related audits. The company makes money when consumers hire them to perform audits of the mortgage paperwork when they are facing foreclosure. The owner of the company is on a crusade against the mortgage industry to expose the paperwork and robo-signing mess, not that that’s a bad thing. But there’s some built in bias here on this purported audit.
Second, there’s no indication of the methodology to determine whether a mortgage assignment is “invalid” or “fraudulent.” What does that mean exactly? What are the audit’s definitions of “invalid” and “fraudulent.” Same for “robo-signed.” Who is determined to be a “robo-signer,” and how is that determination made? I’d like to see the underlying assumptions here.
Based on what I’ve read so far on this “audit,” I’m not sure it would hold up in a court of law. The 75% invalid rate seems very high and questionable, in my opinion. But certainly, these are good questions to ask and analyze and bring to the forefront. It’s clear that Essex Registrar of Deeds John O’Brien wants to recoup all the millions in recording fees he’s lost to the securitization industry and MERS, and he’s the most outspoken of all the registrars of deeds on this problem. (Hmmm, I wonder if Mr. O’Brien has higher political aspirations?).
Well, this problem is big enough that BofA just threw $8.5 Billion to make it go away, and bank stocks are still anemic. So we’ll see how this ultimately plays out.
