Hat tip to fellow blogging Realtor Dean Ouellette who posted about this today.
Good Morning America recently ran a piece spotlighting a Florida homeowner who’s fighting to prevent foreclosure on her home by using a tactic touted by Florida lawyer Chris Hoyer. Hoyer offers the appropriate paperwork free on his website, The Consumer Warning Network.
Forcing your mortgage lender to ‘produce the note’ (which means give me a copy of the original mortgage I signed at purchase) is fairly simple in states like Florida, which are judicial foreclosure states. That means a lender must file a lawsuit against the homeowner before foreclosing. Homeowners can stall the foreclosure by filing a response document with the court demanding the lender ‘produce the note.’
Arizona is a non-judicial foreclosure state though, so the process requires a few more steps from homeowners. The homeowner must initiate the lawsuit, not just respond to a lawsuit already in progress.
You can file a lawsuit on your own without an attorney. But should you? Courts have mind-boggling regulations about everything the color of the ink used for signature to the size of the type and the length of the paper used. You could spend a full 8 hour day trying to decipher it all, I’m sure. (this from a girl who used to be a paralegal, no less)
In addition each state has different rules for serving notice of the lawsuit. Not sure what I mean? You’ve seen process servers in movies. Some delivery-type person walks up to a movie character, hands them a court document and says, “You’ve been served!” The party filing a lawsuit must arrange and pay for the process server.
For fun, check out this version of ‘you’ve been served’ from Judd Apatow’s Pineapple Express. Warning, not safe for work, and rated PG-13 for drug references.
I’m really not sure what the success rate for using Hoyer’s Produce The Note tactic would be in Arizona. Even attorney Hoyer stresses on his website that Produce the Note is a stalling tactic and nothing more.
I’m curious enough to call an attorney I’ve met a couple times, who I know specializes in residential foreclosures. I’ll call tomorrow and report here on my findings. Check back!
Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and the only political junkie in the USA who can actually keep her political views to herself. Instead, she focuses on educating her clients about the often-confusing world of residential real estate.
This post has absolutely nothing to do with real estate. But with the market as heavy and depressing as it’s been lately, I’m casting around for lighter blog material.
I found a couple of intriguing online vendors today, after sleeping a whole lot later than I’d meant to (again!). Realtors work odd hours. My days never start at the same time. One morning it’s a 7:00 AM home inspection. The next day I don’t start work till 10:30 AM, take a 3 hour lunch to eat and run errands, and then work straight through until midnight. For clients with deals in the hopper, I’m on call pretty much 24/7.
Sometimes the alarm clock isn’t enough. I am one of those people who routinely hits the snooze button until the alarm clock gives up and goes silent. This morning I thought, “Wouldn’t it be grreat if I could schedule a wake up call, like at a hotel, only at home??”
I hit the internet and found you can get in-home wakeup calls, in the comfort of your own jammies. Visit Snoozester and Wakerupper. Both allow you to go online, order your call, and each charges a small fee for their service.
Wakerupper gives you 10 free calls, then charges a pre-paid 5cents per call. You can schedule recurring reminder calls. You gain credits for future calls by pre-paying them on a debit or credit card, through the website. Wakerupper has a text to speech feature, so you can instruct it to say “Wake up you sleepy lazy jerk” when it calls you.
Snoozester gives you 10 free calls, then charges on a sliding scale according to use, from $3.99 to $14.99 per month. You can’t schedule recurring reminder calls, but they do have a nifty snooze feature. Press “2″ on your phone and they’ll call you again in a few minutes. You can pay for call credits with debit/credit cards, or gain credits by referring friends.
Wakeupland is another web call service. But they’re 95 cents per call or $4.99 per month. Unlike Wakerupper and Snoozester, Wakeupland does offer pre-recorded text such as Joke of the Day or Fun Fact of the Day, and even Psalm of the Day for those so inclined. Their pricing gets cheaper when bought in bulk.
Some of the press for these websites offer creative ways to use their services (naturally). Want an escape hatch for a blind date? Schedule a reminder call for halfway through dinner. Nag your kids to their chores via Wakerupper or Snoozester.
Wake up calls from the ‘ole intertubes. Who’da thunk it?
Heather Barr is a Realtor. She's a chow hound, a gym rat, and the only political junkie in the USA who can actually keep her political views to herself. Instead, she focuses on educating her clients about the often-confusing world of residential real estate.
