Appeals Court Tells Lender To "Take A Hike" In Response To Request To Vacate F'closure Sale; Screw-Up In Calculating Minimum Bid Leads To $275K+ Hit

The Georgia Court of Appeals recently left untouched a lower court ruling that directed a foreclosing lender to provide a deed to the winning bidder at a foreclosure sale that the lender requested be invalidated due to a mistake in its calculation of its minimum opening bid that resulted in the lender taking a financial hit to the tune of $279,000.

Apparently, the "paralegal foreclosure processor" for the company that was "servicer of the non-judicial foreclosure process" for the law firm that represented the lender in the foreclosure sale mistakenly calculated the opening bid at $27,750.00 when in fact the opening bid should have been $333,000.00. The high bid came in at $54,000, resulting in the $279,000 hit.

In applying the relevant state statutes and case law, the Georgia Court of Appeals details the reasons for allowing the result to stand, and, reading between the lines, the court appears to imply that the lender would have been entitled to relief had it made the proper showings in the lower court that said relief was appropriate (ostensibly, the lender's attorney may not have been up to the challenge of making the case, relying primarily on an affidavit by the "paralegal foreclosure processor" in its request for relief).(1)

For the ruling, see Decision One Mortgage Company, LLC v. Victor Warren Properties, Inc., A10A0247 (Ga. Ct. of App. June 14, 2010).

(1) The appeals court stated, among other things (bold text is my emphasis, not in the original text of the ruling):

• In ruling against Decision One, the trial court determined that the mortgage company had failed to demonstrate any basis for relief under various statutes and case law. Having considered Decision One's arguments on appeal, together with the scant competent evidence of record, we find no error in the trial court's grant of summary judgment to Warren Properties.

(Based on the detailed analysis of the applicable statute and case law set forth in the ruling, it appears that a better job at introducing more "competent evidence" into the record by the foreclosing lender's attorney arguably would have led to a different fate for the lender.)