Express-News Real Estate

Q: I was in foreclosure, and my home was ready to go on the auction block when I notified the sheriff’s office that they were selling half a house. My loan is owned by one of the biggest banks.

We built the home on two parcels of land but the loan was taken out on only one parcel of land. I can prove that the loan was only on one of the parcels.

The lender just reapproved me for a loan modification but the modification would require half of my income to make the loan payments. With those payments, I wouldn’t have any money for my expenses and I’d be one emergency away from falling behind again on the loan.

Would the loan modification help me in any way? And what should I do about the remaining half of a house?

A: Your lender will have a hard time foreclosing on the home if it sits partially on land on which the lender does not have a mortgage or a right to foreclose. Your troubles may not be over, however, as the lender could still use its legal rights to force the sale of the home. However, that course of action may be expensive for them.

When you take out a loan, you have to give a mortgage or other legal document to the lender that secures the payments to the lender. In some parts of the country, homeowners sign a mortgage to a lender, while in others they sign a trust deed or other document that effectively provides the lender a right to sell the property or foreclose on the property to then sell it and get money to pay off the debt.

If your lender was sloppy in evaluating the loan they gave you and failed to understand that the home was on two parcels of land, and if the lender was only obtaining a mortgage on one parcel, the lender can foreclose only on that parcel.

When the lender forecloses on the land and part of the home, the lender could become a co-owner of the home with you. As a co-owner, the lender could try to force the sale of the home. But the lender would have to first foreclose or get title to that part of the home on which they have a mortgage. Then they would have to start a separate action to force the sale of the home.

However, if the lender forces the sale of the home, you or the owner of the other parcel of land on which the home sits would be entitled to that share of the proceeds from the sale of the home. For this reason, the lender may find it easier to try to get you to refinance or modify your existing loan.

If your current lender has offered you a loan with monthly payments that are still too high, you might want to work with them further to see if they can reduce those payments. You want a loan that gives you the chance to make payments without ending up losing the home — or part of it — in foreclosure.

Since the lender might not have obtained a mortgage on the whole property, you’d want to know whether they will try to get a mortgage on the whole property when they modify the loan or change the loan terms for you in any way.

Given your strange circumstances, you’d be wise to talk to a real estate attorney to go over the documents you previously signed with the lender and determine the best course of action.

Depending on your financial situation, if you can refinance the loan at current low rates, you might be able to get a better deal than the loan modification your lender offering.

As you have gone into foreclosure, your options might be limited to lender programs are offered through the Home Affordable Modification Program. You can get more information at www.MakingHomeAffordable,gov. You can also consider trying to sell the home yourself and using the proceeds from the sale of the home to get out from under the debt that you have now.

Your situation, however, has a wrinkle in that your sale of the home would result in all of the money going to pay off the lender. Nevertheless, current loan programs might allow a lender to give you a cash incentive to move from the home. Some of those cash incentives can be quite high. Lenders have been offering incentives of $3,000 and up. Given your situation, your lender may offer you a financial incentive to move that would be much higher than that.

If you have questions, you can call Ilyce Glink’s radio show toll-free 800-972-8255 any Sunday, from 10 a.m.-noon, or contact her or Samuel Tamkin through her website, www.thinkglink.com.

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There is a house for sale that we pass every day on the way to the office. The home’s exterior seems to be well taken care of, but the lawn isn’t mowed. Actually, it’s about a foot high and has gone to seed.

Why would a homeowner who is trying to sell his house not mow the lawn?

Take a look at San Antonio homes from a century ago, and you’ll see that most were built with a technique that elevated the structure a few feet off of the ground, mostly with wood posts of local aromatic cedar. Many of those pier-and-beam foundation posts are still in place today.

A hundred years ago, the most affordable high-quality wood in Texas was from the longleaf pine trees. The trees had been undisturbed for hundreds of years and produced very large diameter logs. These logs gave us long, clear boards that were acceptable for flooring.

Oaks and other hardwoods were always available and had better hardness for durability, but people have always been budget minded. Some San Antonio houses show where a homeowner splurged for vertical grain or “quarter sawn” flooring, a more stable and attractive (and expensive) cut of the pine.

Some San Antonio houses show when an owner upgraded to oak. Owners would put the better oak in the front rooms of a house, such as the parlor, where company would see it, and then put pine in the rear in the less public rooms. In other San Antonio homes, owners went for the whole enchilada: a diagonal subfloor of longleaf pine, and quarter-sawn ¾-inch thick white oak, using only long pieces.

As forests in the South, which provided the source for wood flooring, continued to be cut down, eventually companies ran out of the older, larger pine trees and cutting began to happen on the younger, planted trees. Those baby trees were only thirty or forty years old and there was a tremendous difference in the quality. The 20 growth rings per inch (each ring represents a whole year) seen at the end of a board of the old growth pine was gone. In its place was new growth wood, which had only four or five rings per inch. Homeowners certainly didn’t want to use that for living room flooring, so, at that time, red and white oak became the most common flooring wood. There is one house located in Monte Vista that shows the exact cutoff year of 1923 — it has both old and new growth pine used in the same porch floor.

The newer pine flooring was still used in kitchens, but the more “sanitary” sheet linoleum began being installed over the wood planks because, even though plywood was available, it was more expensive than individual wood planks until about 1960.

Eventually, the elevation of houses was lowered, since concrete slabs became the standard type of foundation after about 1950. Thick wood floors on top of a concrete slab were still unnecessarily used for many years because homeowners were so used to wood. The flooring industry has gradually developed layered engineered wood products for concrete slab applications.

Homeowners whose wood floors have been sanded down or worn down to the point where they can be sanded no more do not need to remove them before installing a new wood floor over them. In fact, this provides a perfect opportunity to add a layer of vapor barrier, such as tar paper, in between the wood layers, to stop letting air conditioned air into crawl spaces.

JR Huebinger is an Associate AIA member and president of Alamo Hardwoods.

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I have an interesting situation. My aunt recently died and left behind an estate that includes a luxury condo in Illinois. My aunt had no family of her own, and left 40 percent of her estate to my mother (her sister), and 20 percent each to me and my two siblings. We have divided and distributed all the assets except for the property.
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Recently, my friend Priscilla Prather of the San Antonio Children’s Museum invited me to work with her to develop a workshop that would expose children to architecture and the idea of walkable communities.
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