Blawgletter listened this morning to part of a radio show on the home foreclosure mess.  It featured the executive director of the American Securitization Forum, an economics writer, and an ethics teacher in a graduate real estate studies program.

A woman called in to tell about how she and her husband lost their home to a lender.  She said she'd tried very hard to avoid foreclosure after her husband lost his job (she still had one) but that the lender wouldn't work with them on a plan to repay their debt.  She said that the lender told a court she never responded to the lender's efforts to cure a default but that the judge vacated the foreclosure when she showed the court her records of the opposite.  When the lender tried again, it succeeded — this time because she never got notice of the hearing.

A sad story for sure.  But something more bothered us.  The show's host asked the guests who had the duty to give notice of the hearing to the woman.  One of them said the court, and not the lender, had that duty.  Nobody disagreed with him.  And so the world at large likely thinks that the court, and not the lender, may have done something wrong.

While we don't know all the ins and outs of judicial foreclosure proceedings — in part because we live in a state that uses a non-judicial sale process – we haven't heard of any state that puts a notice onus on the court and not on the party (lender) who asked for the hearing.  So we seriously doubt that the guest got the answer right.

What do you think?