Statute Of Limitations 'Clock' Continues To Tick On Thousands Of Severely Delinquent NYS Home Mortgages Suffering From Broken Chains Of Ownership

In New York City, the New York Post reports:

• Financial firms that have clogged New York courts with questionable foreclosures may finally feel the effects where it hurts: their profits from troubled mortgage loans.
  
  Eight years after the housing bubble burst, foreclosures nationwide have finally declined to levels last seen before the crisis.
  
  But while pundits talk of “healing” the housing sector, the foreclosure crisis lingers in pockets of New York’s market. A big one: so-called severely delinquent loans, past due for an astonishing six years or more.
  
  New York state has as many as 35,300 severely delinquent loans, worth more than $13 billion, at risk of not being repaid, according to Black Knight Financial Services. The majority of these homes are on Long Island, and in Brooklyn and Queens. New Jersey has 22,000, and both states saw the totals jump more than 20 percent in January from the year-ago period.
  
  These foreclosure cases are so old that the plaintiff may have run out of time to collect on the debt. This issue wouldn’t have arisen without the bundling and resale of individual mortgage loans into securities during the housing boom.
  
  Rushing to profit, banks broke the chain of ownership, robo-signing documents. Even now, many homeowners cannot obtain accurate records of who owns their loan. The broken chain-of-title underlies many foreclosure case delays.
  
  The statute of limitations issue is now playing out in New York’s courts. Rose Marie Cantanno, a New York Legal Assistance Group attorney who has several such cases pending, notes how shocking it is that thousands of New York homeowners have lived in foreclosure limbo long enough for the statute of limitations to kick in. “When this was starting years ago, I said, ‘We’re never going to get to that point.’ ”
  
  Delays are so onerous that last year the Department of Financial Services recommended the Office of Court Administration investigate. A DFS spokesman said the issue “remains a priority.”
  
  Earlier this year, Kings County (Brooklyn) implemented a change to address the foreclosure backlog, turning over 12,000 foreclosure cases to the courtrooms of three judges who will focus on them, instead of being spread among more than two dozen jurists. “Resolution of foreclosure cases is a top priority,” said a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration. “That is one of the steps, and we’re anticipating that will work better, and if it does not, then we’ll modify that.”

Source: Clock begins to tick on those bad old mortgages.