skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Why not? I'm dying to see where the person who purchased the house that's at the center of the mortgage fraud that we've discussed over the last week lives. From the recorded documents we learned that Leonor Essonreid purchases a home in lovely Coral Gables from John Arthur Romney AKA Property Collateral Inc for the hefty sum of $1,080,000. Take a look for yourselves, isn't 911 Columbus Blvd a lovely piece of real estate? I have to wonder, what kind of home did she have before this purchase? Maybe something less expensive in the Gables? Perhaps an apartment on Brickell? Maybe even an older art deco home on the beach? Let's find out, first we find her address as it appears on the mortgage for the property located at 911 Columbus Blvd...There it is outlined in red, 421 East 15th St Apartment 4, Hialeah Florida. Ok, now we're off to see what kind of lovely home Ms. Essonreid owned before trading up to a home in one of the most affluent areas of South Florida. From a quick map quest search we find that Ms. Essonreid lives right around the corner from the world famous Hialeah race track...Ok, so it's off to Hialeah where we find 421 East 15th St...Oh god that can't be right! Let's look again...It turns out that Ms Essonreid does indeed live in this little 1,839 square foot home, to add insult to injury, she lives in one of four 460 square foot efficiencies that makes up this little fourplex. Interesting how someone living in one of the poorest areas in Miami can go ahead and move up to a home in one of the wealthiest areas of Miami that probably has a walk in closet thats the same size as her current home!
Interesting step up for Ms Essonreid huh? Tomorrow we move on to DOMESTIC VIOLENCE!
It's that easy folks! Yesterday we left off with a troubling deed that we found on the Miami Dade County clerk of courts website that involved a company owned by convicted mortgage fraudster John Romney. We asked our readers to take a good look at the document and see what didn't seem kosher about it. Here's the document again...The document is simple enough, a simple deed from the seller, Raul Romero, to the buyer, Property Collateral Inc which is owned by John Romney.Let's start with the most obvious problem with this document, the dates. From the notary section on page two we see that a notary named Aned Perdomo notarized this deed on November 21, 2006, no problem right?But then a closer look at the top right of the first page reveals that the deed wasn't recorded till nearly four years later!WTF is that about? Why wouldn't the closing agent record the deed right after the closing? Moving on, we can also deduce the sales price of the home to Property Collateral through the documentary stamps, in this case based on the clerks stamp it looks like the doc stamps were $4,530.00. In Dade county the doc stamps are calculated at the rate of 60 cents per hundred dollars of the sales price, so in this instance based on the doc stamps the sales price of the home would have been $755,000. So far so good right?
What's troubling is that after another search of the County Recorders Office we can't seem to find a mortgage for Property Collateral's purchase of this property which means that it must have been paid for in cash. Interesting, let's go back to the recorders office website and see if we find anything else regarding this property...HUH? Check the item high lighted in yellow, it's a lis pendens for this very property! According to this it looks like Deutsche Bank began foreclosure proceedings against this property on November 9, 2009. Let's take a look at that document...
How can you file a lis pendens in 2009 when the deed wasn't recorded till 2010? This must mean that there was a mortgage somewhere between November 21, 2006 when Property Collateral aquired the property and November 4, 2009 when the foreclosure action was initiated. So where's this mortgage? It can't be in Property Collateral's name otherwise we would have seen it when we searched the County Recorders website. What now? Let's take another look at this Lis Pendens, specifically who's being sued...
Perhaps searching the recorders website using one of these other defendants names will provide a clue as to what's going on. Let's give it a shot...
Bingo, now we find another lis pendens for the same property that didn't appear in our previous search, one that was filed a little over a year before the others. Huh?! Let's take a look at the document...JEEZE! Let's take a look at the defendants...DAMN! They're suing everyone and their brother! At the very least we can identify Raul Romero as being the guy who sold the property to Property Collateral, but who the hell is "Leonor Essonreid"?
This is where things get really interesting, back to the County Recorders website and a quick search for Leonor Essonreid...Viola, there you have it. Two mortgages for the same property apparently recorded after Property Collateral aka John Romney purchased the property or so it seems... The next part gets real good, we'll discuss on Monday.
