Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: contract

You state all the papers were signed, except that the important papers are those which are notarized and you did not complete those, so how could all papers be signed? Moreover, if there is no preliminary title report, how could the loan be anywhere near completed? Lastly, you can't get a loan on a property which is foreclosed upon because you no longer own it, so how could the lender be held to have breached a contract? You waited too long and you have lost the house and it is not the refinancing lender's fault, only yours.

Re: contract

You may have a claim here. Feel free to contact our CA member attorney; he is highly experience in real estate law and this type of litigation. NanceGroup.com

Re: contract

Refinance documents can run into the hundreds of pages, even for a routine deal. Refinancings of properties that are in default are even more complex. Somewhere in all that paper you will find the lender's "commitment" to lend, and associated with the "commitment" will be, in all probability, some conditions of closing. I cannot possibly tell you whether the lender was truly committed to make the loan in such a way that you could sue it for failing to do so, but the answer (probably) can be found in your pile of papers.

My strong hunch is that you will find something in there resembling a commitment, but it will be conditional uponcertain of your representations remaining true until the closing, or on availability of lendable funds, or leder's reasonable satisfaction with this-or-that. In other words, lenders are careful to leave themselves room to back out of a loan right up until closing. Still, the only ones who can know exactly what your loan contract says are those that can and do read it!

If this was a small lender or mortgage broker you were dealing with, one possibility is that they were expecting to receive lendable funds from someone else paying off their loan due to a sale or refi, but the deal the lender was looking to as the source of funds for your loan never happened, or was delayed. The so-called subprime lending market has been drying up for several months now due to lack of lendable funds, in turn caused by the institutional sources of those funds being spooked by the recent decline in home values which threatens their security.