http://d.yimg.com/img.news.yahoo.com/util/anysize/345,http%3A%2F%2Fd.yimg.com%2Fa%2Fp%2Fap%2F20090217%2Fcapt.891576c564014da9a976c841d1751e64.produce_the_note_flco101.jpgKathy Lovelace, shown looking over mortgage documents at her home Thursday Jan. 12, 2009 in Zephyrhills, Fla., lost her job, then got caught in mortgage-limbo. She tried desperately to hang onto her house, but was getting nowhere with maddeningly uncooperative loan offers and collectors on the phone. Then last fall, she printed a document from a website and filed it with the court, simply asking that the lender produce the original mortgage note. And just like that, the mortgage proceedings stopped.
(AP Photo/Chris O'Meara)
Homeowners' rallying cry: Produce the note
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hLOuvy9fguykC2NydTDrkqqyybvQD96DHN5G0ZEPHYRHILLS, Fla. (AP) — Kathy Lovelace lost her job and was about to lose her house, too. But then she made a seemingly simple request of the bank:
Show me the original mortgage paperwork.
And just like that, the foreclosure proceedings came to a standstill.Persuading a judge to compel production of hard-to-find or nonexistent documents can, at the very least, delay foreclosure, buying the homeowner some time and turning up the pressure on the lender to renegotiate the mortgage.
Chris Hoyer, a Tampa lawyer whose Consumer Warning Network Web site offers the free court documents Lovelace used to file her request, has played a major role in promoting the produce-the-note strategy.
"We knew early on that the only relief that would ever come to people would be to the people who were in their houses," Hoyer said. "Nobody was going to fashion any relief for people who have already lost their houses. So your only hope was to hang on any way you could."
Tom Deutsch, deputy executive director of the American Securitization Forum, a group that represents banks, law firms and investors, dismissed the strategy as merely a stalling tactic, saying homeowners are "making lawyers jump through procedural hoops to delay what's likely to be inevitable."
Judges are often willing to accept electronic documentation. And lenders are sometimes allowed to produce other paperwork to establish they are the holder of a loan. Still, assembling such documents to a judge's satisfaction takes time, which to homeowners is the point.
Lovelace filed her produce-the-note demand last fall after the bank acknowledged that her original mortgage document had been lost or destroyed. Since then, there has been no activity on the foreclosure — no letters from the lender, no court filings.A University of Iowa study last year suggested that companies servicing mortgages are often negligent when it comes to producing the documentation to support foreclosure. In the study of more than 1,700 bankruptcy cases stemming from home foreclosures, the original note was missing more than 40 percent of the time, and other pieces of required documentation also were routinely left out.
HERE IS A "HOW-TO"
http://www.consumerwarningnetwork.com/2008/06/19/produce-the-note-how-to/
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