Mandelman website writes:
Remember Arizona’s Senate Bill 1259 that would have required servicers to produce a declaration that they had the proper chain of title prior to foreclosing on someone’s home? You know… the one that passed the Arizona Senate 28-2 that I wrote about back on February 23rd of this year?
Remember maybe a month ago when I tried to follow up to see how the bill was proceeding in the Arizona House of Representatives… only to find out that on the way to the House… it disappeared… the text replaced by some bill about firefighting with the same number? And no one was saying a word about it? If you missed it, I wrote about it here.
Okay, well… it appears that the story is not over yet.
It seems that one Arizona homeowner set out to revive the essence of the bill, drafting an amendment and recruiting Rep. Carl Seel to propose that it be added to Senate Bill 1474, being sponsored by Senator Ron Gould.
His name is Darrell Blomberg, and he’s a Phoenix area Realtor, and a past president of one of the local boards of Realtors… who is now involved in auditing trustee sales for homeowners. Basically, he looks for some basis upon which a sale might be cancelled, or at the very least postponed. He acknowledges that it only represents a temporary solution, but it’s often important to the homeowner nonetheless. He was actually working on one such audit for Rep. Seel, which is how the two came to know each other.
I’d heard about him from another contact I have in Arizona as being someone very active in the legislation related to foreclosures, so I reached out to him over this past weekend to see what he knew. He returned my call after reading my story about the disappearing SB 1259 bill, and he certainly did have some news for me and he was very disappointed about the whole thing.
According to Mr. Blomberg, it seems that when the day came around for Rep. Carl Seel to propose the amendment, as he had agreed to do, he was running late and ultimately didn’t get there on time. The amendment was never proposed as a result.
When I first heard Darrell the story, I thought… well, maybe it was traffic. Or, a doctor’s appointment that ran late? Perhaps friends came in from out of town?
When Rep. Seel was asked what had happened to prevent him from showing up on time to propose the amendment, he explained that he had decided not to propose it because he was told there was no chance of it being adopted… something about it not being “germane,” whatever that means.
One thing though… from what Darrell explained to me, Carl Seel must have been in a very good mood the day of his unexpected tardiness, because even though he had been previously turned down twice for his own loan modification, two days before he showed up too late to propose the amendment, Ocwen granted him a PRINCIPAL REDUCTION that reduced his mortgage to $88,000 from roughly $190,000… that’s a reduction of approximately 56% give or take a few points one way or the other.
Now that is lucky, was all I could think to say. Really lucky, considering it was Ocwen, a servicer I’ve been told is among the most difficult when it comes to modifying loans. In fact, it’s almost like being the single-ticket-lottery-winner-three-days-in-a-row kind of lucky, wouldn’t you say?
Read on.
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