Legal Question in Real Estate Law in California

Re: ripped off

What's your position in this? Are you the borrower, the lender, the appraiser, the loan broker, the trustee, a junior or senior note holder, or what?

When a lender makes a loan and received collateral that is insufficient, in a foreclosure, to allow full repayment (either due to insufficient value per se, or to other liens with higher priority), the loan and the lender are said to be undersecured.

Undersecured loans most frequently become issues before a court when the lender sues the appraiser, or the broker who hired the appraiser, and the theory is that the appraiser's negligence caused the loan to be undersecured, to the lender's ultimate detriment.

If you are the borrower, your grounds for complaint would seem to be somewhat limited, since in a sense you benefitted by getting a bigger loan than your collateral would indicate, and it could even be argued that this was a fraud on the lender. However, the average homeowner is not as sophisticated as the average hard-money lender in the ways of finance, and there could be some onus on the lender for allowing an owner to get overextended. Usually this problem arises not when the loan is undersecured so much as when the payments exceed the borrower's apparent ability to pay, which is a somewhat overlapping problem but essentially a different matter.

If you could give me more facts than contained in your two-sentence question, I could give you a better answer.