Wednesday, December 08, 2010

MERS: The Central Player Responsible For Clouding The Title To Millions Of Homes Through Destruction Of The U.S. Land-Record System?

Attorney Abigail Field writes at AOL's Daily Finance:

  • Petersen detailed how the banks, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Ginnie Mae destroyed America's land-record system, a method of tracking property sales that's existed since colonial times. Instead, they put in place a system called "MERS" (for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems) that's legally shaky, makes tracking mortgage-note ownership extremely hard and may be clouding the title of millions of properties.

  • But the MERS situation could be even worse than Petersen described to Congress: Millions of documents, including millions of foreclosure documents, may have been signed in MERS's name by people without the power to do so. A lack of authority would call into question the validity of all those documents. While the ramifications are uncertain, the bottom line is, as Petersen told me: "This issue injects yet another level of uncertainty into the already murky swamp of foreclosure nonsense."

For more, see MERS: The Mortgage Database That's Clouding Millions of Titles.