Option One assigned the Springfield mortgage to Lehman Brothers Bank, FSB, which assigned it to Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. Next the mortgage was assigned to the Structured Asset Securities Corporation (a Lehman subsidiary), which then assigned the mortgage, pooled with approximately 1,220 other mortgage loans, to U.S. Bank, as trustee for the Structured Asset Securities Corporation Mortgage Pass-Through Certificates, Series 2006-Z.

The rub is that US Trust couldn’t show any evidence of these assignments. As soon as Ibanez mortgage entered the securitization assembly line, the assignments stop being duly noted on the mortgage, much less recorded in any property registry offices. The last proper assignment in evidence was the assignment from Rose Mortgage to Option One.

The court goes out of its way to show that it is not being especially picky about who assigns the mortgage or when the assignment is done. US Bank could have proven its ownership of the mortgage by having Option One simply assign the mortgage to US Bank—skipping all those intermediate Lehman steps. But US Bank didn’t do this before it foreclosed, which made the foreclosure invalid.

The solution to this seems easy enough. From now on, banks seeking to foreclose should just make sure that whoever is the last recorded assignee grants a new assignment to the foreclosing entity before the bank takes any action. No doubt this is what Goodman has in mind when she says banks will go back and re-document the assignments.

It might not be so easy. Let’s say you are US Bancorp and you find yourself with a mortgage whose chain of title is incomplete. You took the mortgage from a now bankrupt subsidiary of the now bankrupt Lehman Brothers. Getting someone at Lehman to go through the process of executing the assignment is going to be very difficult. It’s not even clear if anyone at Lehman Brothers has the legal authority to execute an assignment now, while Lehman is bankrupt.

In any case, getting the assignment from Lehman wouldn’t really help you. You’d still have a gap in the chain from Option One to Lehman. It’s probably best to skip over Lehman all together and go directly to Option One to ask for the assignment.

But you have a bit of a problem. You didn’t buy the mortgage from Option One. They aren’t under any contractual obligation to you to execute any documents. So when you call, here’s how the conversation goes.

US Bank dude: “Hey, can I speak to whoever it is who is handling the Ibanez mortgage?”

Option One guy (after some delay): “No one handles that mortgage. We sold it five years ago to Lehman and closed the file.”

US Bank: “Right. Okay. Well, I need you to find someone who will execute an assignment of the mortgage to me.”

Option One: “First of all, no one who handled that mortgage still works here. You might have heard about the mortgage meltdown, right? Second, we sold it to Lehman, according to the file.”

US Bank: “Right. But I bought it from Lehman.”

Option One: “So get the assignment from Lehman.”

US Bank: “They’re an empty company that is in bankruptcy.”

Option One: “I’ve heard about that. Thanks for the news.”

US Bank: “So I need you to execute the assignment.”

Option One: “First of all, you’re going to have to show me that you bought the loan from Lehman. Second, I need to talk to legal to make sure I can assign a mortgage to someone we never dealt with. Third, how much are you willing to pay me to do all this?”

US Bank: “Pay you? I already own the mortgage.”

Option One: “The mortgage we sold to Lehman. If Lehman asks for the assignment, we’ll do it as part of that deal. But, as far as I can tell, I don’t owe you anything. If you want an assignment, you’re going to at least be paying the legal bills for the legal opinion that says it’s okay for us to do this.”

US Bank: "You don't have to be an [expletive deleted] about this."

Option One: "I also don't have to give you an assignment."

By the way, if you do get Option One to assign it to Lehman, you might find yourself trapped. In that case, the mortgage arguably becomes part of the estate of Lehman—subject to the jurisdiction of the bankruptcy court. Sure, eventually, you may be able to prove that you are entitled to the assignment from Lehman. But you’ll be fighting the other creditors, who will argue that you are just one more unsecured creditor in a long line of people who say that Lehman owes them something.

While this example might be specific to loans that went through Lehman, these kind of problems are not likely to be confined to the sizable part of the mortgage market that went through Lehman at one time or another. A great many of the companies involved have entered bankruptcy or changed ownership. When these companies appear in the ownership chain, “re-documenting” the assignments may be all but impossible.

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