Foreclosure Rates Up After a Brief Interval

An interesting aspect of the process of filing affidavits came to the surface last month, when allegations and lawsuits erupted across Montgomery County. These lawsuits were over improper handling of filing practices in the county by 4 of the major lenders, including JP Morgan Chase, bank of America, GMAC and PNC Bank. These allegations caused the 4 major lenders to suspend new filings for a few days. The number of filings this year has been good until now, including 4000 foreclosures in Montgomery County, 1200 in Warren County and 703 in Greene, the numbers almost doubling over the last 10 years. Although, the recent allegations slowed these filings for some time, the pace of foreclosures is slowly picking up strength once again in the region. Luckily, suburbs like Mason OH homes for sale have been spared in this uprising of foreclosures.

The allegations erupted after many critics pointed out to the filing practices as faulty and fraudulent. Meanwhile the Montgomery County Common Presiding Judge, Barbara Gorman, said that her staff is looking at these cases in order to understand the true scope of the whole issue. She said that they are very serious when it comes to allegations of fraud as far as documents filed with the court are concerned. One of the people who filed lawsuits against GMAC was Richard Cordray, the Attorney General of Ohio, who was of the opinion that the affidavit practices were fraudulent. He said that the lenders had used robosigners to swear falsely that the documents have been reviewed. In fact, there was ample proof of this, when Jeffrey Stephan, swore that he signed as many as 10,000 afidavits in one month for GMAC, falsely swearing that he reviewed those documents.

Inspection of two such affidavits signed by Jeffrey indeed showed that, in the two affidavits relating to houses in Montgomery County, one in Englewood and one in Watervliet Avenue in Dayton, he swore that he had personal knowledge of those documents involved in the foreclosure action. Meanwhile, Stephan Mudick from JP Morgan Chase was of the opinion that although, some of the employees might have mishandled certain aspects of the filing process, the amount of money owed was represented correctly in the documents. On the other hand, Thomas Morano who is head of GMAC’s mortgage operations, admitted in front of the Congress, that the process of filing affidavits adopted in GMAC was indeed flawed. These allegations had considerably slowed down the filings in the County until recent times when reports have shown that they are back to normal action in Dayton as well as in Cincinnati real estate.