Not Just Foreclosures!

If there is one single simple message I want you to take away from my writing about this issue, IT’S NOT JUST FORECLOSURES!

Every transfer of real estate from a seller to a buyer involves a title search which includes little things like just what are the boundaries of the property AND WHO OWNS IT!

If you pay cash, who owns “your” property is perfectly clear (usually) but we don’t customarily hand over wheel barrows of bills or even cut a check.

Usually you purchase by financing and share your title with a bank which has the right to seize your property if you don’t make the payments specified in your contract.  You’ll also be expected to pay for “title insurance”.  This protects the bank’s investment if it is later discovered that the person who sold it to to you has about as much right to sell it as I have to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge (you set a hard bargain, how about just what you have in your pocket right now?).  You, on the other hand, won’t get much satisfaction from it.

Now if you don’t pay the bank they take your property and sell it.  That’s foreclosure.  But what if you are paying the bank and have a better offer come along?

Well, normally you could just pay the bank what you owe (including the penalties in the fine print that they use to make this difficult and expensive for you and profitable for them) and accept the money from the new purchaser and transfer the title.

You found a sucker who’s willing to buy the Brooklyn Bridge for more than you paid me?  Congratulations Gordon Gekko.  Greed is good.

On the other hand, what has happened if you have financed or re-financed in the last 10 years is that your title (even supposing I had a legitimate claim to the Brooklyn Bridge because it was built on and with the bones of my Viking Ancestors) has been sliced and diced into so many pieces that the banks can’t track it anymore.

You can’t sell your property because you don’t have clear title.

Anyone who buys property at the moment is no better than a rube who’d buy the Brooklyn Bridge if the price was right, and this is ALL property.  That there is a market at all is a testimony to how many rubes are born every minute.

Now me, I have the $6.45 you had in your pocket which I’ve already invested in a bottle of Night Train so I can sleep under my bridge.

Your government, Barack Hussein Obama and all his Washington Wall Street Wizard Advisors, think that if they can just keep you from peeking at that man behind the curtain you’ll always find a sucker to sell to, but the title insurance companies aren’t buying it.

Nor should you.