Justia Real Estate & Property Law Opinion Summaries

This case arose from Plaintiff’s sale of property to Defendants. In November 2006, Plaintiff filed a complaint against Defendants alleging negligence, fraud, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and failure to follow home equity sales contract requirements. In May 2012, Fidelity National Title Insurance Company moved to dismiss the complaint for failure to bring the action to trial within the five-year time frame required by Cal. Code Civ. Proc. 583.310. The trial court dismissed the case in its entirety. In so doing, the trial court concluded that the time during which the court had vacated the trial date and ordered a 120-day stay of proceedings to permit the parties to engage in mediation did not support tolling. The court of appeal affirmed. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that the trial court’s order did not effect a complete stay of the prosecute of the action, nor did it create a circumstance of impracticability, and therefore, the period of the “mediation stay” did not toll the five-year period. View "Gaines v. Fidelity Nat’l Title Ins. Co." on Justia Law

Plaintiff was a borrower on a home loan secured by a deed of trust. The deed of trust was assigned multiple times. After Plaintiff’s home was sold at public auction, Plaintiff filed this wrongful foreclosure action alleging that the assignment of the deed of trust to the foreclosing party bore defects rendering the assignment void. The court of appeals concluded that Plaintiff could not state a cause of action for wrongful foreclosure based on the allegedly void assignment because she lacked standing to assert improprieties in the assignment where, as an unrelated third party to that assignment, Plaintiff was unaffected by such deficiencies. The Supreme Court reversed, holding that a home loan borrower who has suffered a nonjudicial foreclosure has standing to sue for wrongful foreclosure based on an allegedly void assignment even though she was in default on the loan and was not a party to the challenged assignment because an allegation that the assignment was void will support an action for wrongful foreclosure. View "Yvanova v. New Century Mortgage Corp." on Justia Law

Under Cal. Code Civ. Proc. 580b, when an individual borrows money from a bank to buy a home and the bank forecloses on the home, the bank can collect proceeds from the foreclosure sale but may not obtain a deficiency judgment against the borrower. In this case, a Borrower arranged a short sale of her home and sold her home to a third party for an amount that fell short of her outstanding loan balance to a Bank. The Bank then demanded the balance remaining on the Borrower’s home. The Borrower brought this declaratory action, claiming that section 580b prohibited the Bank from collecting the deficiency. The trial court sustained the Bank’s demurrer. The court of appeals reversed, concluding that section 580b’s protections apply after a short sale, not just a foreclosure. The Supreme Court affirmed, holding that section 580b applies to short sales just as it does to foreclosure sales. View "Coker v. JPMorgan Chase Bank" on Justia Law