Mortgage Debt & Home Equity

After seeing yet another prominent news article grousing about the tax consequences of short sales and other forms of mortgage relief, I thought I'd pass along a discovery I made a few years back that seems to be ignored over and over in the popular press.

My friend, Frank Venis, sent me a link to a Planet Money/NPR story that 42.1% of home purchases are now in cash. I have been meaning to write up a quick post on the story since the story appeared, but my day job kept interfering.

        One of the huge questions hanging over the mortgage market today is what will happen to access to credit for credit impaired or non-traditional borrowers.  There is a real concern that the Dodd-Frank Act’s mortgage reforms will reduce the availability of mortgage credit because lenders’ fear liability for making mortgage loans that fail to qualify as “Qualified Mortgages” (QM) and are thus potentially subject to an Ability-to-Repay (ATR) defense.

I've got a new article out in the Duke Law Journal entitled The Paper Chase:  Securitization, Foreclosure, and the Uncertainty of Mortgage Title.  The article is about the confusion securitization has caused in foreclosure cases because of the shift in legal methods for mortgage transfer and title that accompanied securitization. 

For the last 18 months, I've served as the California Monitor for the National Mortgage Settlement at the request of California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris. Disclaimer: This post does not necessarily represent the views of the CA AG or CA DOJ. It's just me, Professor Porter writing. And what I wanted to write about is the first in a series of thoughts that I have about where mortgage servicing policy needs to go in the future.