Can you believe the news?
Can you believe everything people tell you? Of course not, and I can her my Dad right now, "If your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump off a cliff?" No, and I still believe in this very valuable advice.
Last week I was enjoying my morning coffee while watching some of the national cable news programs. Wow, they do a great job creating a very entertaining show. The topic was the mortgage crisis, and they were talking about the foreclosures and that the investigations were underway. Foreclosures had been halted in all 50 States and we would be lucky if we ever saw another good loan. It was bad, they made the housing industry sound terrible.
I started to wonder if we would be selling homes next week. Then this week they have another gentleman on came to say they had it all wrong. The host was very suspect of his statements. The guest speaker went on to say that there was a tremendous amount of misinformation being tossed about as fact. Well guess what?
He was right. I did a little research to clear my mind and to be able to answer questions from friends and clients that wanted to know what was what. There seems there were cases that people were wrongfully foreclosed on, but this is the exception not the rule. There was also the issue of title being lost in the shuffle as Wall Street made all this money. I am referring to the Securitization of loans. They mentioned on the show that if the security was traded that the title history could not be tracked. This turns out to be a bunch of fear mongering.
The M.E.R.S., Mortgage Electronic Registration System is used to tract mortage backed securities. the 14 digit number that tracts the loan package is recorded as an assignment at the local Recorder's office. This number keeps track of the Title history. There is no problem.
The news channels are selling advertising, so they make the story interesting. Kind of like Dr. Seuss made kid stories interesting.
If you need help decerning fact from fiction please give me a call. Eric Bushnell 907-360-7471
