I haven’t written here in a while as we have totally relocated. We have gone from the Northern California Coastline to the Southern California desert, and man, what a difference.

I just finished my 45 hours of mandatory “Continuing Education” and am waiting for my new license from the DRE. In the meantime, I can’t help notice the differences between the San Francisco Bay Area, and the Southern California Palm Springs area. We have moved to Palm Desert, just about 15 minutes south of Palm Springs.

While I see plenty of Notices of Trustee Sale in the paper all the time, they are building like crazy here. I haven’t tuned in enough yet to know what the City finances are like here, but no one seems to be hurting. I know that’s not the case, but that’s what it looks like to the outside world.

I think a lot of what is going on here has to do with the fact that Baby Boomers have come of age. The desert, in most cases, is touted to be better on older people’s health. Older men, do they not dream of playing golf all the time in Palm Springs? We definitely have our share of retirees here, but then I am now old enough to be classified in the “seniors”. So many of the communities here are not “Senior” communities, but “Over 55″ communities, in which the laws are quite a bit different.

Learning the market here as I wait. Looking forward to getting to know a lot more about my surroundings.

Today I’m a buyer. Oh, I’m still a real estate broker, but today I am calling agents on listings just as you would. The next time you hear a Realtor gripe about how bad business is, ask them if they ever answer their phone, or return phone calls. I am aghast with the lack of service from my own profession.

We have to be out of our mobile home here at the Surf and Sand by the end of the month, so needless to say I am seriously looking for a new home. This is what I have run into.

One of the first listings I called about tells me to call the number with an extension number to find out more information (like the price of the property). The way these work is I call the number, a pleasant recorded voice tells me all about the listing, and the agent captures my phone number to call me back, which she did. Even though she had the extension number I had called, she had no clue what property it went to and was asking me what property I had called on.

Hey, I’m like most buyers. By the time she called me back I had called on a few properties. I didn’t know which one she was calling me back on. If she has my number from a particular extension, she should be able to tell right away and have all pertenant information before she even calls me. She sounded like an idiot, and if I had everything set to go today, she would have lost the sale. What really surprised me is she is part of an office of a really well known broker. I was appalled at the lack of professionalism.

I called on another listing I’m very interested in. It turned out to be a lender advertising the listing. The ad says to call his number for information, which I did. He had no information, said he would try to find an agent for me and call me back. So what happened with him? I told him I had not qualified with a lender. He never got an agent to give me information concerning the listing evidently, as he never called me back. Not only am I not interested in the listing any longer, but if there was a loan, he lost it.

If I was a real estate trainer training a class of real estate agents, and happened to call these two listings as examples, the classes would be laughing their butts off right now as what is so obvious not to do.

With the competition of the internet and so many real estate agents trying to make a living in a slow market, service should be their first priority. If you have to chase an agent to get information on a listing, chances are you will have to do the same if you have them represent you in a transaction.

residents beg for mercy

As the thought that trailer/mobile/manufactured home parks are big business spreads across the nation, my thinking that blackmail and extortion were against the law is apparently wrong. As park owners and their lawyers back small and large cities alike into a corner, they seem to be allowed to use any methods they deem necessary to win.

In most of the youngest yrs. of my life, I started out in a “trailer park” of about 10 or 12 (trailer) homes lined up across the road from each other on a farmer’s property in North Carolina.  It was one of the biggest and best for it’s time, 10 x 50, 2 bedroom, 1 bath, and we had a big lot. At that time, when my father got a job in town and we needed to move, we just hitched the trailer to the back of the car, left the porch (Florida room) behind, and we were gone.

As I got older and was a real estate professional, I learned they were no longer “trailers”, they were mobile homes, and they were bigger and more beautiful than ever. Between friends and clients that had mobile homes, I could see that if you wanted the best “bang for your buck” this was the way to go. They had built-ins that were beautiful, and no ‘stick’ or ‘site’ house at a reasonable price could match the amenities. Yet as early as the early 80′s I came across a greedy park owner in Milpitas, Calif. that had found a way to circumvent the Mobile Home Residency Law and rent control by offering 5 yr. leases. At that time, if I remember right, the statewide law was that the park could only raise the space rent 5% to a new buyer, unless they offered leases longer than 12 months.

Now I’m back to living in a mobile home as society makes the transition from “mobile homes” to “manufactured homes”. I found the info below on the Consumer reports type website:

A recent survey finds that 19 million people — 8 percent of the U.S. population — lives in 9 million manufactured homes, as opposed to “site-built” homes, as the trailer trade refers to traditional houses.  The average manufactured home owner is 53, with a median household income of $24,500. Eighty-three percent are high school graduates; 46 percent attended college. Why so popular? Probably most important, manufactured homes are affordable.

Of the foreclosures you hear about all over the news these days, the majority are not mobile/manufactured home owners. Those people purposely chose this lifestyle because it was “affordable”. Manufactured homes are better than ever. Along with that is the lack of ability to still be able to “hitch it to your car and drive away”. They are more beautiful, more expensive, and more stationary, than any of  their predecessors. Now that mobile/manufactured home owners are trapped by where they have chosen to live, park owners and their lawyers have moved in for the “kill”.

In our park recently, many of our residents were forced by the park owner      and

Tearing down a home, a history

his lawyers to give up their first amendment rights in order to get a lease that would protect them when the city repealed it’s rent control ordinance. Originally the City had postponed doing anything more regarding repealing rent control. As they repealed it last night, one of the councilman stated they had to in order to protect the residents in our park that were actually offered leases.

What happened here? The park owner and his lawyers blackmailed the residents into signing hianus leases with the threat of pulling the leases already given to a very few park residents that truly needed them (like a case of life of death). Then the park owner and his lawyers threatened the City that if the City didn’t repeal their rent control, they would pull all the leases from the extremely low, medium low, and moderate income people. In the settlement agreement that the people made with the park owner and their lawyers they agreed to:

1. Not show up at the City Council meeting or any other public meeting regarding the repeal of rent control for 30 days (Right to peaceful assembly)
2. Not oppose any repeal of rent control within the City (Freedom of Speech)
3. Not initiate any successful referendum fighting the repeal of rent control within the City.  (California Constitution)

I can’t believe that this is all documented publicly, and they are getting away with it. Even taking advantage of legal services for the poor, with all the budget cuts, etc. those people aren’t equipped to fight this. What’s even worse is the lawyers that understand and know mobile home law are very few. There really is no justice for the poor. This has turned into big business for these park owners and their lawyers. Rents in this dilapidated park for small spaces of dirt, have gone from $2-400 per month to $1300-2800 per month, and that’s just for the dirt people’s homes sit on.

I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t really say this is blackmail or extortion by the letter of the law, but that’s sure what it looks like to me. All this time I was thinking blackmail and extortion were against the law.

Tearing down a home, a history

I’d jump the bridge, but too many friends live underneath it. I’m sure many of you who have gone through foreclosure, or lost your home in any other way that wasn’t of your making, may be feeling the same way.  Maybe many of your neighbors have lost their homes to whoever their lender was. The difference is there is new legislature almost every other day to protect people in their homes, whether they be renters or owners, unless you live in a mobile/manufactured home.

As I wrote in my last post in June (I really have been away too long), the City Council of Capitola had come to an agreement with the owner, Ron Reed, of the Surf and Sand Mobile Home Park in order to get rid of a couple of lawsuits Mr. Reed had filed against the City. You can see the post “Real Estate And Politics” here.

Since that took effect I have one neighbor who is all but bedridden with depression and worry. I have four neighbors on my street or the cross-street who have just given up their homes.  And a week from yesterday, my own mobile home will go to auction for “storage fees”.  In 9 months of paying rent here, the park owner has never given me the right of tenancy, and as soon as the City Council did their thing with the new ordinance, he raised my rent by triple-plus what is was originally. What’s funny is I would pay his raised rent, but then he still would not give me tenancy, so what good would it do?

It’s sad enough when it’s a matter of the economy. Yes there are so many people that say “well they shouldn’t have bought a home they couldn’t afford” when it comes to foreclosure. Has anyone else noticed that it’s people with super credit that are also losing their homes  now? No matter how good they were about paying bills in the past, that now without a job, they can’t be A+ anymore?

And for Capitola, it’s even more sad when a town of only 10,000 people have hired a “goon squad” for a City Council. What’s really sad is some of us did it to ourselves. We voted for these people. Why? Because they all said they were interested in fighting for the same causes we were. Now, not even a year later, they have hidden their tails between their legs, and turned on us.

Across the nation lawyers are getting rich and mobile/manufactured home park owners are getting richer. In our own park the landowner supposedly made $420,000. last year even with rents under rent control, and never put a dime back into the park.  People have had to tear down and rebuild here because the infrastructure won’t take the 50 amps of a new manufactured home, it can only sustain 30 amps because the infrastructure has never been kept up to date.  So people have to amp down their homes in order to live here.

I cry as I write this morning, not just for myself, but for all the people everywhere who are losing their homes to greed. Most of these park owners don’t live in their parks like the old “mom and pop” owners did. Many are bought up by corporations strictly to see how much more money they can make. They are accomplishing it by bringing cities to their knees in lawsuits and paperwork.

Most people bought their homes here because they planned to retire here. They wanted something they were sure they could afford. Now the Capitola City Council is running from different lawsuits and is planning on repealing rent control completely.

You ever wonder how the politicians ever got so bad that we have in Washington? They got trained in hometowns across America.

The hole that's left

Real Estate and Politics, subtitle:  “Follow the Money“.

As I wrote in my post “When Property Rights Collide” Mobile/manufactured home park owners have been at war with park residents across the nation, and especially in California, concerning space rent and rent control.

Last week in Goleta, CA, there was a landmark case where the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal by the park owner regarding the “taking of his land for public use”. The park owner had won in the lower court fighting Goleta’s rent control ordinance. The park owner lost in the Ninth District Court of Appeals, and by the Supreme Court refusing to hear the case, it sets a precedence that the Appeals Court ruling stands. This helps cities everywhere that are trying to protect their elderly and lower income mobile home citizens by fighting for their rent control ordinances.

What the City of Capitola has chosen to do is re-write their rent control ordinance and add a “Subsection D”. This section de-regulates rent control for the mobile home parks in the City that still rent out spaces instead of being resident owned. Due to this new “Subsection D” I have learned more about real estate and politics than I ever wanted to know.

As a result of the City Council passing the new ordinance (behind locked doors during a flood, I might add), the mobile/manufactured home residents chose to gather signatures for a referendum to either repeal the ordinance, or put it on the ballot before the voters. Due to a technicality (the pages weren’t stapled together properly with the ordinance when turned in), the City sited the referendum as “insufficient”, which means it goes no further than City Hall.

The effort was put forth by many of the low income citizens who now cannot afford the $15000 or $30000 the lawyers say it would cost to fight it in court. For now, the City has won and the new lease packets have been sent to the residents in the Surf and Sand Mobile Home Park stating what the new rents would be for each space.

The packet I saw was approx. 252 pages long and asked for everything from the resident’s name to her underware to prove she was low income and qualified for the lease she was offered. This same packet has been sent to other residents in the park that are in their 80′s or 90′s, or mentally/physically challenged and they have 21 days to respond. This lease would take a month of Sundays and a half dozen attorneys to get through in a lifetime. I don’t know how these people are supposed read, let alone understand what they are signing if they accept.

The rents range from $475 being the new low for “extremely low income” to $2800. for those not categorized in the extremely low to low, to moderate income categories. Many people do not know what they will do, and everyone has lost any equity in their homes that they may have had. While going through this myself here, I can only imagine the devastation to the people at the De Anza Mobile Home Park where their rents are now anywhere from $2000 to $5000 per month.

As for everything any kind of government does, it seems this is yet another case where they have over compensated and gone from one extreme to the other.

The residents aren’t thru yet. There is still a possibility of getting free legal through Senior Services, or many other alternatives yet to try. If you happen to be a mobile/manufactured home park resident where ever you are and haven’t been able to purchase your space from the park owner, be vigilant about maintaining your rights. Many people here didn’t bother to get involved until there was too much at stake.

abandoned mobile home

You own your house, you usually own the land your house sits on, either as a single family residence or in co-operation with other homeowners such as in a townhouse or co-op-type set up. If you are a mobile home owner, chances are you rent the land your home sits on, thus making you a homeowner and a tenant at the same time, subject in many states to two kinds of laws. In California, there is tenant-landlord law and then there is the Mobile Home Residency Law regarding mobile home/manufactured home owners and mobile home park owners. This is where property rights of each have a tendency to collide.

Many cities have a quota of how many homes they have to have that are affordable to “low income” people. Mobile homes have been “unofficially” used to fill part of that quota in many areas. As such, cities have made ordinances regarding rent control. Over the years people have bought mobile home parks and have reached agreements with their tenants on rights, responsibilities of each, and rents. In recent years it has become fashionable for investors to buy these mobile home parks at a cheap price, then applying to the cities to raise rents or turn the parks into condominiums, and if they are turned down, suing the cities claiming the city is “taking” their land for public use.

There are court cases after court cases with plenty of lawyers for both sides fighting until one side or the other folds due to costs. On the one hand, if it’s your land you should be able to do as you wish with it. On the other hand if that drives people out of their homes which they purchased and have added money to through the years, thinking they would always be able to live in the mobile home park they have chosen, what then?

Such a case is happening right now in the city of Capitola, California. There are 4 such mobile home parks within the city limits. The other mobile home parks are “resident owned”, where the mobile home owners own the property in conjunction with each other. Three out of the four park owners is suing the city because of the city’s rent control ordinance. The fourth mobile home park owner just threatened to sue. For years this battle has gone on. The City claims to have paid a million dollars over the last 10 yrs. defending rent control. The mobile home residents have paid almost half of that bill.

The owner of the Surf and Sand Mobile Home Park inherited the park from his father. When I first came to live here, it was an “over 55″ park, which of course makes for a park mostly of Seniors. It was a well maintained park in a very desirable location just up from the quaint Capitola Village. Rumor has it that the park started as a place the original owner used to invite his friends to bring their trailers and spend the weekends and/or vacations. Residents even dedicated a park bench to him that still sits on the cliff on the edge of the park. Now some of those same Seniors are in their 70′s and 80′s, and the park has changed from a “Senior” park to an “all age” park. Now the owner (son of the original owner) and grandson have decided they can make more money by putting this land to other use. This is where the collision of property rights begins.

Up until a few years ago, new tenants that owned residences somewhere else were encouraged to buy in the park and use this home for vacations, and some day to retire. The infrastructure is outdated and never could stand the pull on utilities if everyone lived here full time. Now the City of Capitola has amended their rent control ordinance to allow the owner to raise rents in the park, on some with no ceiling on the rent hike. People who own second homes will immediately see rent increases that could 1) wipe out any equity or value in their homes 2) be so large they have to abandon their homes because they can’t sell them and can’t afford to keep them.

For many Seniors in the park, the rent will increase, for some to double what they are paying now, and they are being offered a 34 yr. lease. I don’t personally see what good a 34 yr. lease is going to do for someone who is already 80 or 90 yrs. old. I guess the park owner could have agreed to 50 yr. leases and it wouldn’t have made any difference. When the mobile home owner dies, the rent immediately increases to the owner’s idea of “market rent”. The lease is not transferable, and anyone who inherits the mobile home inherits the expensive space rent.

When they did this to the De Anza Mobile Home Park in Santa Cruz, California, many people abandoned their homes. The space rents range between $2000.00 per month and $5000.00 per month. Beautiful $200,000.00 manufactured homes are selling for as low as $14000.00 to $19000.00 because the space rent has gone so high.

While I believe that a land owner should be able to make money on his land, the cities have gone from one extreme to the other. Instead of reaching a fair agreement for everyone, they either won’t allow anything or they allow everything, hurting the ones that can least afford the change. Many of the Seniors, mentally challenged and physically challenged will not be able to afford their homes any more because they are on fixed incomes.

The City will still have legal fees as some of the mobile home/manufactured home owners are suing the City of Capitola over the new ordinance. Many others are scurrying to gather enough signatures to make the City put the new ordinance on the ballot and let the residents of Capitola decide if it’s the right thing to do. And, if this should fail there is another lawsuit waiting in the wings from other home owners who don’t fall into the first class action suit. The City didn’t get rid of the problem, they just traded one set of legal fees (on court cases they were almost sure to win) for another set of legal fees.

I always thought a mobile home/manufactured home was the best buy for your buck. They always had so many amenities and built-ins, per square foot they were a deal. Now my advice would be, if you are buying a mobile home, make sure you’re buying your space with it so this doesn’t happen to you. It becomes an all out war when mobile home owners and mobile home park owners property rights collide.

Scene across the street

I have to say in the last few weeks I have learned more about California Mobile Home Residency Law, Turn-coat city politicians, and how “he who has the gold makes the rules” than I ever wanted to know at this close range.

I have learned that when it comes to the laws to protect mobile home owners, the agency who made the laws has nothing to do with enforcing them. You can have a slum landlord for a mobile home park as well as you can an apartment building. Who do you go to to report violations of the law? You sue him in court.

Then there are the rent control ordinances of cities and municipalities. Not every city has rent control laws, but the ones that have put them in place to protect their senior citizens and their low income people from becoming homeless, put them there originally for a reason. In the General Plan there is usually a certain “allotment” for senior and low income housing. Cities will bribe new developers or take advantage of already existing housing to fulfill those numbers. Not everyone has good intentions though when it comes to this kind of housing.

There are mobile home owners all over the state of California suing

$19000.00

cities over rent control ordinances pertaining to their properties that were originally designed to be rent controlled mobile home park spaces. Years later, kids have inherited the properties, conglomerations have bought the properties thinking they are going to get rich from the land even though they bought them under rent control, and suing the cities until they can’t bleed anymore money, and cave in. I have a mobile home in such a park.

Capitola is a beautiful ‘City-By-The-Sea’ as it says under it’s ‘Welcome to Capitola’ signs. Capitola Village is small and quaint and full of out-of- towners when ever the weather permits. The man who originally owned this mobile home park that sits up on the hill at one of the entrances to the city, originally had this land and invited his friends to bring their trailers there for vacations and holidays. It soon turned into a trailer park for ‘Seniors’. Many years later it became a ‘family’ or all age park, but it is still pretty populated with our seniors who have come here to retire and live in one of the most beautiful spots in the world. Some aren’t in so good a shape. Others have put their whole life savings into their homes here. Many are on low fixed incomes that couldn’t afford to be anywhere else.

Now the man has long since died, and his son and grandson see this property as a goldmine. The owner has been suing the City until now, when there is a light at the end of the tunnel, it looks like an end to the fighting, the City has decided not to fight him any more and has totally rewritten their own rent control ordinance to benefit this one man. Well, I shouldn’t say to benefit only one man when it turns out the city itself owns one of these mobile home parks and wants to turn it into a parking structure. This change in the ordinance will help the city raise rents on that park and force people out the same way the owner of this park will do here. There are a total of 3 other mobile home parks that will suffer the same fate as we shall as soon as this ordinance is passed.

The equity in our homes will be completely gone as the rent for our spaces go up, left to the discretion of the park owner. It’s already happened in Santa Cruz. That city council did away with the rent control and now you can buy a beautiful mobile home there for $19000.00 that no doubt cost the seller $100,000.00. Did I forget to mention the space rent is only about $2100.00 to $3000.00 per month? It’s one thing to lose your equity over an over all economic condition like we are all going through, but to have a small public entity that you voted into council just rip it out from under you seems to hurt even more. I wonder how some of these people will afford the new rent on their monthly social security?

I went to one of my first city council meetings last week when they did the ‘first reading’ of the new ordinance. The politicians don’t tell the truth anymore in a small town then they do when their running for President. They exaggerate how much the city has spent to defend us. They don’t tell the truth about how much the mobile home parks have paid of those fees. They actually planted people in the audience to get up and speak in favor of the new ordinance because they new real citizens wouldn’t do it.

If it wasn’t so appawling I would be laughing. One city councilman actually had his campaign manager stand up. They called in an old city councilman that had lost in the last election. There were 3 others that “acted” like concerned citizens. How ridiculous is that? LOL.

Kitchen before Laminate

I have always loved hardwood floors for their beauty. I have always hated hardwood floors for the care they required. After a terribly bad experience I had with hardwood floors in a duplex I rented when I was quite young, I have always carpeted everything. Today hardwood floors still seem to be the desired look when getting your home ready to sell, but there’s a whole new breed of flooring out there today.  Laminates seem to be the new trend in flooring.

I had my first introduction to laminate flooring when I listed a house in Mountain View. You walked in the front door right into this huge living room that was absolutely beautiful. The whole living room and hallway had been done in this fairly light colored laminate which I could not tell from hardwood. My clients were the first to give me an education about the new kind of flooring.

Next time I ran into it, my boyfriend’s son had turned his living room into a bar type environment. He had a bar with stools, and a pool table, etc. He chose to do his living room in this rather dark colored “Bamboo”. He installed it all himself and it came out so beautifully, he’s chosen to go on and do the rest of the downstairs in this type of flooring. I can’t even explain here how “rich” it looks.

Now we’re remodeling our mobile home (See my post “When  Real Estate Meets a Sociopath“). After learning how easy it is to install and care for, I went on a hunt for Laminate flooring for our kitchen and dining area. We can’t afford much, but that’s another thing that is so great about this stuff. It doesn’t cost nearly as much as the old “hardwood” floor. Like anything you need to educate yourself a little bit on what kinds of flooring are available, and of course shop around.

We ended up at Bay Area Flooring Live. He’s located in Willow Glen and just moved into his new showroom about a month ago. He’s got different kinds of the flooring actually laid down in his floor so you can see some of the different textures, what it might look like in your house. He has a ton of samples. The hard part for us was what color to pick. He doesn’t carry a bunch of inventory but is more of a “broker” for factory direct flooring, so his prices are really great. He’s also very knowledgeable about what kind of flooring is best based on the project you are doing. Thank goodness for his help because there was so much and many different kinds to choose from, I had no clue what I was doing!

I’m really excited. We went and visited him last week and will get the flooring in this week. The color we picked needed to pull together the “dessert sand” color the last guy painted the kitchen walls, yet go with the white cupboards and off white carpeting in the living room. I didn’t want anything too light as we needed some contrast, yet nothing too dark as the mobile home has a tendency to be a little dark already. We ended up with “Golden Teak”.

If you live anywhere in the San Francisco Bay area and are looking to remodel or give your home a bit of a “lift” go visit John at Bay Area Flooring Live. Tell him Lauri sent you and take a look at all the Laminates, the new trend in flooring.

House Flipping

Speaking of house flipping, did you hear the one about the 10 people indicted on Friday for bilking mortgage lenders out of over $20 million? These 10 people devised a scheme where they not only put in loan applications for people that didn’t exist, but they kept flipping the same house(s) to inflate the price thus being able to borrow more money.  The Feds are looking at them for bank, mail and wire fraud, plus money laundering. I guess it was good while it lasted. LOL.

Maybe you heard the one about the unregistered sex offender (ex-firefighter) and his partner that were contacting owners of homes before they went to foreclosure sale. They would get the homeowner to relinquish the property and then “flip” it to a new buyer. The buyer would put down a down payment or a mortgage payment, and these two gentlemen would use it for what ever they chose instead of getting the house out of foreclosure. Their scheme involved about 10 houses and they were headed to California presumably to do the same.

Maybe you heard about the sale “rigging” going on on the courthouse steps? A group of investors get together and pay people not to bid on particular properties so as to not inflate the price. What this would mean to you if you were a homeowner whose home has gone to sale, is if your home might have sold for more than you owed the bank, you may have received “proceeds” from the sale. If investors are paying to keep the bids down, there isn’t much of a chance of that happening.

Even builders are getting in on the act. A builder in Ohio built high-end luxury homes. He would then sell it to a “straw buyer” and submit false loan applications and contracts stating he received down payments he never received. The builder then got to walk away from approx.  $3.5 million in mortgage debt, and gained about $500,000 in seller proceeds. They have so many counts against this guy, he’ll be lucky if he ever sees the light of day again.

The hits just keep on coming! Speaking of “house flipping” did you hear the one about…?

Hey, I’ve just recently met Benjamin from Zion Engineering. If you have any demolition needs or remodeling, live in the San Francisco area, this guy and his team are a wonder. Visit their website and then give them a call. Tell him “Lauri” sent you.

I am so happy someone is finally paying attention to Wells Fargo and their shoddy foreclosure practices! They were the ones when B of A pulled a moratorium on their foreclosures to check legality of paperwork, etc. that kept saying they weren’t halting foreclosures for a minute because they knew they did everything correctly.  Well, at least one (Supreme) court in one state disagrees. Hallelujah!

If you read my story here about what happened to us, then you know our home was foreclosed on by none other than Wells Fargo Bank. We tried dealing with them on a loan mod, we tried just getting them to let us rent until our lease ran out, everything. They would have none of it. Then as a last ditch effort, we said “Show us the Note”. They are supposed to produce the original note that says they even have a right to foreclose. They never did that either. They just bullied their way right through us because we couldn’t afford an attorney.

If you didn’t see this, a judge in Massachusetts ruled that when Wells Fargo and US Bancorp foreclosed on 2 borrowers in 2007, they didn’t have the right as they didn’t have the proper paperwork. This ruling returned the homes to the borrowers.

While I am happy to see a reigning in of these banks with absolutely no conscience, this could be a double edge sword. If enough others start fighting to get their homes back in other states, we could see the mortgage market dry up. Lenders will be even stricter than they are now about home loans which could cause an even bigger stand still on the road to recovery.

It makes me want to consider fighting to get my own home back, but then I have to ask myself, do I really want it back? Like many of the homeowners foreclosed on, legally or not, I could not make the house payment any more. Of course now there are a lot of new programs out there that weren’t available when I was getting foreclosed on. Still, thanks to a bad refi by my partner, the payments had jumped to $4400.00 per month. It was crazy! I remember feeling actually relieved to an extent that I didn’t have to worry about how to come up with that much every month anymore. It made rent where we are now seem like a piece of cake.

I don’t know the answer. I think it’s awful how callous the banks and institutions have been as they push people out of their homes, many after living there a really long time. We were in our home 17 yrs. while my children grew up and all sorts of life’s memories. We can’t get back any of the things we lost because we couldn’t get it all out in the time allowed. I think for us it’s just a time to keep going forward. We have the mobile home in Capitola to worry about now.

If you’d like to follow our journey rebuilding the inside of our mobile home from scratch on less than a shoestring budget, you can join me at http://www.lauriannsnewlife.blogspot.com

In the meantime, if you are going through foreclosure, it’s getting easier and easier to “buck the system”. Don’t just settle for Wells Fargo’s shoddy foreclosure practices, or any other bank. Tell them to “Show me the note”.