Foreclosures Against Parties with No Interest in the Property

• Author: Rebecca A. Taylor
• Pages: 149-153

Foreclosures Against

Parties with No Interest

in the Property

Chapter 17

149

As a bank attorney, I would sometimes be contacted by people who

asked me why they were getting all the foreclosure mailings and

irately demanded that I take them off my mailing list. These calls

could sometimes be the result of sloppy work by the title depart-

ment responsible for finding all parties who could possibly have

interest in the subject property and naming them so that they could

be foreclosed out. Sometimes it was a corporation that had a similar

name to the real party in interest. It might also be a person who sold

or relinquished his or her interest in the property years before—for

example, the divorced spouse of one of the parties whose interest

in the property was extinguished by the dissolution of marriage.

Ultimately, such a party is usually dropped from the case. How-

ever, this could possibly damage an innocent party’s credit or have

other adverse effects from being named in a lawsuit.

Because the banks’ goal is to push foreclosures through as

quickly as possible, they often prosecute foreclosures with a one-

size-fits-all approach. For example, when naming defendants to the

foreclosure action, the foreclosure title department will run a search