Utah Law States that Foreclosing Entity Must be Based in State
If in Summit County a house is foreclosed by a firm that does not hold the mortgage loan and has no legal standing to proceed with it in Utah State usually there is nothing that the homeowner can do about such a situation. This has been the bitter experience of residents of Utah numbering hundreds who have been foreclosed upon by a firm named ReconTrust. The latter is a branch of Bank of America.
Over one hundred houses have been sold this year in Summit County as per the notices inserted in The Park Record. Foreclosures have been started on three other units even after the office of Utah’s Attorney General threatened the firm with a legal suit on 18th March.
The firm is illegal because the laws of Utah State (the recent ones having been enforced seven years previously), mandates that any agency foreclosing on a property has to enlisted with the Utah State Bar and be situated in Utah. The headquarters of ReconTrust is in Texas. It does not comply by any of these rules.
There is another sang with the foreclosures of ReconTrust. It gets its “rights” to foreclose by means of electronic deed transfer. This is done by MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registry Service) but according to another law of Utah the foreclosing agency must be physically in possession of the deed.
This has led to local residents fighting back the foreclosure attacks. Last March, Elizabeth Corey a resident of Jeremy Ranch together with her lawyer Ryan West brought a lawsuit against MERS and her mortgage lender, Countrywide Financial Corporation; the latter has been taken over by Bank of America and is no longer in existence.
But her lender was neither of the two – Countrywide or BofA. West has argued that they are not holding the promissory note and have not been harmed by Corey’s failure to pay mortgage dues.
The money for her house had come from those who owned the security backed by the mortgage; her mortgage being one of the many included in the security. Thus it does not belong to any one bank. The latter was a mere vehicle that added the mortgage to the security.
The counter argument is that the homeowners fell behind in their payments and thus they should not be living in the houses; it is or no relevance as to who is the owner of the note argued lawyer John Christian Barlow of St. George.
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