|
Montgomery County Recorder of Deeds NANCY J. BECKER is urging recorders/registers of deeds across the state and the country to become involved in bringing awareness to homeowners about he truth of what is happening in the Land Records Office.
In recent years, mortgages have been assigned and reassigned multiple times, and when a bank or other entity doesn’t properly report these transfers, it makes it very difficult for homeowners to determine who holds their mortgages.
“It clouds the chain of title, and it’s prohibiting (officials) from recording revenues they are entitled to,” Becker said. It’s just sloppy sloppy work.
Since 2004, she estimates her county has lost $15 million in fees from 139,798 mortgages recorded via the electronic recording system that fails to reflect assignments. Becker said she fields calls about once a month from a homeowner seeking help finding proof a mortgage has been satisfied, so the person can sell their house.
 “When was my ‘AHA’ moment? After about the 50th person came into my office having problems with notices against their property but they had paid or were paying. I started researching it out and quickly saw MERS for what it was.
“Then came the Robosigners scandal so we started getting signature cards for the notaries. Just recently, one of my people has uncovered a half dozen notaries working with expired notary seals, all of them associated with Wells Fargo.”
“I can see what they were trying to do and while I think their charge to standardize property records across the country was a noble act, it didn’t work, it failed tremendously. Coming back to try to fix this is going to be an enormous undertaking. It is a huge snowball of a problem.”
What can you do? The first thing to do is to make your own County Recorder aware of what is happening and show them the money they are missing. The next thing you can do is urge your recorders/registers of deeds to withdraw public money from any banks affiliated with the Mortgage Electronic Registry System (MERS), which she claims is undermining the practice of accurate land recording.
Help us bring awareness to this problem by putting us in touch with the county recorder at your county courthouse. We’ll show them what we see and they can judge for themselves.” |
Vermont Trotter
