PORTLAND — The Oregon Legislature and Supreme Court have at least one definite topic on their agendas in the new year: finding a solution to the state’s foreclosure standstill.
Oregon’s foreclosure mediation program was supposed to give homeowners one last chance at keeping their homes. Instead, it brought out-of-court foreclosures to a halt. The logjam was compounded by an appellate court ruling that lenders’ recording practices didn’t meet state law. Five months later, foreclosures are still taking the slower, costlier court route.
By November, preliminary reports show, the number of court foreclosure filings had more than tripled to 882 in a month. “We still think this is just a fraction of what will be pending out there," said Doug Bray, trial court administrator in Multnomah County Circuit Court, which has appointed a four-judge panel to deal with foreclosure issues in an effort to get ahead of a possible surge of cases if judicial foreclosure becomes the norm in Oregon.
— From wire reports
