Oregon Court Rulings Could Change Foreclosure Processing
The Oregon Supreme Court handed down two rulings Thursday that are likely to affect how foreclosures are processed in the state. Both cases deal with the mortgage industry database known as the Mortgage Electronic Registration System. MERS, as it’s also known, was created to keep track of the ownership of secured home loans as they were bundled and sold off to Wall Street. But when the Oregon Court of Appeals ruled last summer that MERS was not compatible with the state’s non-judicial foreclosure laws, banks started taking delinquent lenders directly to court.
Paul Cosgrove is an attorney representing the Oregon Bankers Association. He says although the two decisions are highly technical, he says court essentially validated the bank’s use of MERS.
He explained, “Financial institutions who have loans in default can probably move back to non-judicial foreclosure and we can return to a process that’s very similar to where we were before all of this litigation happened.”
But attorney John Bowles, who represented plaintiffs in one of the cases, claimed victory for his side and noted some legal questions on MERS remain unsettled. READ MORE
