Many People in US May Owe No Mortgage

2½ months ago, I commented on a peculiar foreclosure case, where the judge had halted a foreclosure because the holder of the title could not be confirmed.

The title had not been properly processed as the mortgage was packaged and repackaged.

Well, it looks like this problem may be far more widespread than previously anticipated:

Joe Lents hasn't made a payment on his $1.5 million mortgage since 2002.

That's when Washington Mutual Inc. first tried to foreclose on his home in Boca Raton, Florida. The Seattle-based lender failed to prove that it owned Lents's mortgage note and dropped attempts to take his house. Subsequent efforts to foreclose have stalled because no one has produced the paperwork.

``If you're going to take my house away from me, you better own the note,'' said Lents, 63, the former chief executive officer of a now-defunct voice recognition software company.

Seven years of no payments on a million dollar plus mortgage for two years, because the creditors cannot prove that they own the mortgage.

They simply cannot find out where the paper that says, "I own the mortgage", is, and how to assign it to the proper entity.

This means that there may be trillions of dollars in which there is no note, and hence no way to enforce the mortgage.