Thursday, August 14, 2008

this has been the week of crazy titles

I think I mentioned in a previous post the issue of a title agency not understanding that a prior mortgage was divested in foreclosure, a fact which was confirmed by attorneys for our title underwriter who rejected the request for indemnification.

The poor buyer who hired the title company is caught in a trust quagmire. His title agent still insists the title is no good and he doesn't know who to trust, our company or the other. I said, well, we'll back up our word with the title policy. I further pointed out that the mortgage holder had taken no action against our insured seller and that is evidence that they understand that they are divested. Yoi......

I have another title issue on my desk. We transferred ownership of a church parsonage last year. A local bank called me yesterday asking why we hadn't gotten a release on their mortgage. I checked the file and saw that our abstractor had reported NO mortgages against our parcel. The bank faxed over the mortgage and I agree, our parcel is on it. I have a call into our abstractor to recheck the record and get back to me on the oversight. Maybe it was mis-indexed or maybe he just made a mistake. Humans do but this abstractor is good and is rarely wrong.

In the meantime, I called the church contact and found a board member who was clueless. They hadn't told us about the mortgage because they did not know the bank used the parsonage as part of the collateral when they built their new church.

So, I have a call into the lender to find out if the parsonage was included in the appraisal. If not, seems a simple release will do. If yes, the bank and the church will have to work out getting our parcel released.

All in a good title day's work..... ;)

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