Residential short-sale transactions have been commonplace in Arizona for at least the last six years. Many homeowners that have sought to short sale their residential properties have expressed a great deal of frustration. This frustration has been caused by: (1) the length of time it has taken to obtain approval from the lender; (2) the lenders' repeated requests for the same financial information ...
Hogan v. Washington Mutual Bank Can a borrower/property owner defeat a non-judicial foreclosure sale (trustee's sale) by demanding that the lender prove that it is the holder of the underlying promissory note? In Hogan v. Washington Mutual Bank the Arizona Supreme Court answered that question with a resounding "No." In Hogan, the borrower defaulted on the loans for two properties. The lenders, ...
Helvetica Servicing v. Pasquan - Recent Case Law Affecting Arizona’s Anti-Deficiency Statutes - One Step Forward, One Step Back In its recent decision in Helvetica Servicing v. Pasquan, the Arizona Court of Appeals sought to address two questions that have lingered since the Court's decision in Bank One v. Beauvais. First, the Court looked at whether construction loans used to build a residence ...
At Schern Richardson Finter Decker, our practice focuses primarily on real estate and commercial litigation matters. However, as a result of the downturn in the Arizona real estate market, real estate practitioners in Arizona increasingly find themselves assisting clients with issues related to taxation and bankruptcy. It has come to my attention that tax professionals are presently counseling ...
42% of Arizona home sales are distressed properties.* A new analysis shows that more than 42 percent of all Arizona home sales last year were either foreclosures or in some stage of foreclosure. That's an increase of 12 percent from 2010 but a slight drop from the number in 2009. The report released Thursday by foreclosure tracking firm RealtyTrac shows the percentage of distressed sales in the ...
Arizona Mortgage Settlement - How Will Settlement Dollars Get To Homeowners?* On February 9, 2012, an historic joint state-federal settlement was reached between Arizona and 49 other states, the federal government and the country’s five largest residential mortgage loan servicers—Ally/GMAC, Bank of America, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo. The settlement will provide as much as $25 ...
The Arizona Court of Appeals recently expanded Arizona's anti-deficiency statute governing the pursuit of a deficiency following the foreclosure of a deed of trust in the case of M&I Marshall & Ilsley Bank v. Mueller (link provided). Most home loans are secured by deeds of trust in Arizona. When a homeowner quits making payments, the lender may foreclose on the home through an auction via a ...
Excerpts from "The Death of the McMansion" by Witold Rybczynski of Slate.com The U.S. housing market is going through an adjustment of historic proportions. Before 2006, when the housing slump commenced, American home builders regularly built as many as 2 million new houses annually, rarely less than a million. This amount was needed to keep up with new household formation, immigration, homeowners ...
The LA Times reports that: [m]ajor banks may be forced to let severely delinquent homeowners sell their houses for less than the loan amounts owed as part of a broad settlement of federal and state investigations into botched foreclosure paperwork, according to government officials involved in the negotiations. The requirement to allow so-called short sales would be in addition to forcing mortgage ...
While the long-term housing outlook is beginning to look up, 2011 is projected to be the peak year for foreclosures during this market cycle. Distressed homeowners who are on the brink of a short sale, loan modification or foreclosure should be aware that normally, any mortgage balance on a primary residence that is wiped out by one of these outcomes is taxed as what the IRS calls Cancellation of ...
The W.P. Carey School of Business at ASU recently reported that in January and February 2011, foreclosure sales in the Phoenix area shot up to 43% of all transactions that occurred in those months. That rise is up from 30% in the final months of 2010. Out of 8,500 single-family home resale transactions in February, more than 3,600 were foreclosures. The median price for a single-family home in ...
The goal in interpreting a statute is to find and give effect to the intent of the legislature. Mail Boxes, Etc., U.S.A. v. Indus. Comm'n, 181 Ariz. 119, 121, 888 P.2d 777, 779 (1995). In determining the legislative intent, the court must first look to the language of the statute. Canon Sch. Dist. No. 50 v. W.E.S. Constr. Co., 177 Ariz. 526, 529, 869 P.2d 500, 503 (1994). If the statutory language ...
The Federal Trade Commission recently imposed a new rule on those companies providing mortgage relief to homeowners through short sales, loan modifications, and other mortgage relief options. The FTC issued the Mortgage Assistance Relief Services (MARS), Rule 16 C.F.R. 322, to prevent consumer abuses by sham companies claiming that, for a fee, they will negotiate with the homeowners' lender to ...
Residential short-sale transactions have been commonplace in Arizona for at least the last six years. Many homeowners that have sought to short sale their residential properties have expressed a great deal of frustration. This frustration has been caused by: (1) the length of time it has taken to obtain approval from the lender; (2) the lenders' repeated requests for the same financial information ...