Shortly after the tornado hit NoMi, Alex Stenback of the Behind the Mortgage blog posted this article about how insurance premiums are allocated. It's no secret to northsiders or pretty much anyone else in Minneapolis that the storm damage was compounded by having gone through an area ravaged by foreclosures and vacancies. The Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal stated that over 200 vacant or foreclosed properties were affected by the storm to some degree.
One glaring problem with damaged foreclosed properties is figuring out who owns them in the first place? Securitized home loans were split up on the secondary market with various entities owning parts of each mortgage. And often those entities aren't even easily traced. The Mortgage Electronic Recording System, or MERS, is a storage point of sorts for securitized mortgages. Essentially MERS facilitates multiple, frequent transfers of mortgages by having their name listed on state and county records as the owner - even though they only store the data of who really does own an interest in a property. So if a foreclosed property needs repair or demolition, how do we hold such "owners" accountable?
Putting a more human face on this, however...
