There is a company based in Alpharetta, Georgia called DOCX LLC that specializes in outsourced mortgage assignments and recording of mortgage documents for lenders across the nation. DOCX is a subsidiary of Fidelity National Financial, Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida, the nation’s largest title insurance company. Another subsidiary of Fidelity National produces the software that is used to process nearly half of all U.S. residential mortgages. Fidelity National also provides flood insurance, homeowner’s insurance and home warranty insurance.
Since the housing bubble started to burst, DOCX has been kept very busy processing foreclosure-related documents. Many of these documents are required by law to be processed in very specific ways, within certain time-frames, be signed by specific persons and notarized, etc… For example, if the initial lender decides to assign the mortgage to another party for a fee, that other party must be a real person or company with a real address. Often these assigned mortgages are placed into a trust and there is a date by which that must happen. Mortgage payments should be made to the legal holder of the mortgage. Failure to follow the legal requirements can be grounds for dismissing a foreclosure action. Unfortunately, most people facing foreclosure do not know the rules or how to tell if they have been violated by the lender.
Discrepancies have been turning up in mortgages as the housing crisis has persisted. Lawyers trying to help homeowners have been in the forefront finding these problems. As more problems surface, DOCX LLC would appear to play a role in many of them. One of the problems that has come to light are persons signing mortgage paperwork while claiming to be officers of multiple companies. Another problem has been mortgages assigned to third parties that would not seem to be real persons or companies and have no address. A further problem concerns the transfer of mortgages into trusts long after the allowable transfer date while payments went to a party no longer holding the mortgage. The dates on some paperwork is just not believable. These problems should make foreclosing on that mortgage highly questionable if challenged in a court of law.
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