By Adam Leitman Bailey and Carly Greenberg Today’s bank robbers rarely use a mask and gun. The crimes are usually completed at a real estate transaction’s closing table. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lenders incurred more than $1 billion in mortgage losses in 2005 as a result of fraud.1 During this same time Full Article…
Right of First Refusal: In Pursuit of an Effective, Ligitation-Proof Proviso, New York Law Journal
By Adam Leitman Bailey and John M. Desiderio Since biblical Abraham’s purchase of his wife Sarah’s burial plot in Hebron from Ephron the Hittite, the transfer of land has been creative, predictable and repetitive.1 Despite the familiarity of such transactions, land transfers have been the subject of an inordinate amount of litigation. Of course, the Full Article…
Growing Fraud– Self Help Measures can Head Off Problems, New York State Land Title Association Bulletin
By Adam Leitman Bailey and Carly Greenberg Today’s bank robbers rarely use a mask and gun. The crimes are usually completed at a real estate transaction’s closing table. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, lenders incurred more than $1 billion in mortgage losses in 2005 as a result of fraud.1 During this same time Full Article…
HETPA Contains Land Mines For Unwary Attorneys, Buyers, New York Law Journal
By Adam Leitman Bailey and Dov Treiman In February of 2007 the Home Equity Theft Prevention Act (HETPA) passed the New York State Legislature, attempting to stop scam artists from stealing or tapping the equity of victims’ homes. HETPA had two principal areas of concern: the substance of transactions involving persons in distressed circumstances selling Full Article…
Title Insurance Complexities in Tax Foreclosure Purchases, Mortgage Banking Magazine
By Adam Leitman Bailey and Dov Treiman For the past four years, nearly every title company providing title insurance in the United States of America has been scrambling to interpret federal and state court decisions setting the rules for determining when a tax foreclosure sale will be safe from judicial knockouts. When the U.S. Supreme Full Article…
The Brewing MERS Crisis: Everyone Loses, New York Law Journal
By Adam Leitman Bailey and Dov Treiman In Homer’s Odyssey, the protagonist, Odysseus, is called upon to sail his crew through the Straits of Messina, passing between two legendary monsters, Scylla and Charybdis. To avoid one, the only option was to approach the other, risking a horrible death in either instance. Odysseus was at times Full Article…
The New Rules of Foreclosure Litigation, New York Law Journal
The New Rules of Foreclosure Litigation By Adam Leitman Bailey and Dov Treiman Since the first loans and mortgages changed hands with cloaks and stone in Israel[1] and Greece[2] thousands of years ago[3], never previously had mortgages caused a worldwide economic collapse of financial markets. Unfortunately, as the federal and state government as well as Full Article…
Moving Beyond the Mistakes of MERS to Secure a Profitable National Title System, ABA Probate & Property
by Adam Leitman Bailey, Dov Treiman Adam Leitman Bailey is the principal of Adam Leitman Bailey, P.C., in New York, New York. Dov Treiman is a partner in the New York, New York, office of Adam Leitman Bailey, P.C. In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus is called on to sail his crew through the Straits of Messina, Full Article…