It can’t be very much fun to contemplate losing one’s home at the start of the holiday season. Nevertheless, the Boston Globe is reporting that Massachusetts home foreclosures rose a whopping 35% in October. That figure represents homes actually seized; foreclosure petitions, which track homes that banks intend to foreclose on in the near future, [...]

You are probably aware just how difficult it can be for a homeowner to get a mortgage modification when he or she needs one. Perhaps you have had a personal experince trying to get your mortgage modified, only to be told “no” after submitting reams of paperwork. Is it possible that a bankruptcy court mediation [...]

Homeowners who are successful and navigate the often arduous loan modification process are liable to “hit the roof” when they get a foreclosure notice anyway. Yet this bizarre scenario is probably more common than you would think. The Boston Globe just ran a front page article on how a Lawrence woman is suing Bank of [...]

Some folks just love to wait until the last minute to get improtant things done. And then there are those folks who wait until after the last minute . . . In the world of bankruptcy law, it has long been thought that there is nothing that can be done to recover a house that [...]

The Boston Globe recently reported that Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley is not backing off her invetigation into the practices of the Mortgage Electronic Registration System known as MERS. Recently, a Massachusetts bankruptcy judge found no fault in the use of MERS to record mortages in dummy names at the registry of deeds statewide and [...]

MERS is doing OK here in Massachusetts. Just in case you are not obsessed with the lingo of real-estate banking, MERS stands for Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc., a corporation whose sole business is filing mortgage documents at county registry of deeds nationwide. If you check your mortgage doen at the Northern Essex registry of [...]

For several years now, the one thing the big banks have insisted on is that they are in no position to reduce the balances on underwater home mortgages. Now it turns out that some of them are in fact, very quietly doing just that. As reported by David Streitfeld in the New York Times and [...]

This is not an upbeat story; but I think it needs to be on here. The Boston Globe reported this week that the Attorney General’s Office has filed civil charges against Revere lawyer David Zak, charging that he took large fees from homeowners facing foreclosure, and then didn’t perform the work. Zak has denied the [...]

The federal government has ordered sixteen large mortgage lenders, including the nations four biggest banks (Citibank, Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America) to reimburse some homeowners who were improperly foreclosed upon since the recession began in 2007. The list also includes lenders active in the Lawrence, Haverhill, and southern New Hampshire markets such as [...]

What could be worse than the foreclosure of your home? How about a whopper tax bill resulting from the “forgiveness” of the unpaid debt! Following a foreclosure that does not recoup the value of the property being seized — pretty typical, in today’s housing market — the foreclosure will generate a 1099 for the difference [...]