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In most other countries, you must be licensed to make [tag]mortgage loans[/tag], which U.S. lenders are not. Even if no license was required, U.S. lenders making mortgage loans in other countries could not enforce their liens against borrowers in default except by complying with the local rules regarding how liens are established and enforced. These rules are mainly determined by local laws and customs, and are often affected by local politics. It is difficult enough, even in the [tag]United States[/tag], for a lender to take someone’s home away from them for failure to repay their loan. No lender wants to do it in a foreign country.
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Even within the United States, our 50 states have 50 different sets of laws on lien enforcement. While differing in many important details, these laws have in common that they are written in English, and all provide lenders with the right to enforce their liens within a reasonable period by following some well-defined procedures that protect borrower rights. As a result, we have some national lenders who operate in every state. But we also have many lenders who don’t operate in all states, and many operate in only one. Even in the United States, the process of enforcing liens may become politicized if the number of defaults in a state becomes very large. A U.S. lender experiencing heavy defaults in a foreign country would find the barriers to lien enforcement even greater. (more…)
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Much of the 1,000-acre [tag]Chimney Rock Park[/tag] put up for sale for $55 million this week would be open to development, should negotiations with the state fail.Chimney Rock Co. President Todd Morse stressed Wednesday that he and his family — owners of the land for more than a century — want to preserve the park’s trails, the chimney and other sensitive natural areas.
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The public roams through about 550 acres that includes the 315-foot-high chimney, a 404-foot-high waterfall and miles of hiking trails. But above the cliffs lie another 450 acres that the public never sees, including an old apple orchard and woods. “If you had a development up on top of the mountain that could be separate from the park but had some interaction with the park — if you could leave the park basically alone — that’s one thing that could be kind of wonderful,†Morse said. (more…)
As interest rates on some $2 trillion worth of first mortgages in the U.S. reset over the next three to four years, industry watchers wonder what the economic fallout will be. “I had four new clients yesterday and all four were adjustable-rate mortgages,” Barbara May, a Roseville bankruptcy attorney and a director of the National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys, said recently. “I’ve already had another one this morning.”
A group at particular risk for payment shock are borrowers who chose ARMs around 2002 and 2003, when interest rates were at rock bottom, and are soon to experience their first rate adjustment. Altogether, about $400 billion in ARMs will reset this year. About one-quarter of the total pool of first mortgage loans in the U.S., or about $2 trillion, carry interest rates set to adjust in the next three to four years, according to an analysis by LoanPerformance, the San Francisco research unit of First American Real Estate Solutions. (more…)