A ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court Wednesday overturned an lower court's decision that suspended thousands of foreclosures in the state. The new decision allows Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems (MERS), a third-party record-holding agency that acts on behalf of lenders to foreclose on homes. "The Supreme Court's decision affirms MERS business model and will allow the Michigan real estate industry to get back to business as usual," said Bill Beckmann, president and CEO of Merscorp, the parent company of MERS in a story reported by DSNews, a mortgage industry news site.
MERS is an privately held company that runs a database tracking the ownership of mortgage loans. It claims to own titles to nearly half the country's mortgages, The New York Times reports.
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A report released Thursday by the Center for Responsible lending found 3.6 million households nationwide are at "immediate, serious risk" of losing their homes.
In Michigan, where real estate prices were already low before the market collapsed, lower-income borrowers are most likely to lose their homes to foreclosure, the report found.
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