A friend of mine is a divorce attorney and she told me a case that she had were a couple bought a house together. They both had their name on the title, but only the husband’s name on the loan. A few years later they got seperated and filed for a divorce. During this time thier house was forclosed and sold at auction to a 3rd party. The wife is now sueing the 3rd party claiming that she owns 50% of the property.
My questions are:
Does she have a case?
If she does, how would you screen for this in your research. It seems like it would be almost impossible to.
With the number of divorces these days it seems like this could come up quite often.
Unlikely the lender made the loan without her signoff… but that will be hard for the investor to prove without help from the lender. If that help was not forthcoming I’d be suing the lender saying they had a duty to disclose (whether they really do or not), and then really hoping they can produce the paper that shows she signed off on the loan.
Bottom lines is that I don’t know the answer for sure, but even if you couldn’t produce the doc, my guess is that you’d still prevail since they were married at the time, and the loan proceeds likely benefited her. She shouldn’t get two bites at the apple.
A larger lesson here: anyone can sue you for anything at anytime, and if you buy at the steps you will be sued sooner or later. It is just a cost of doing the business.