Metro Vancouver mortgage lenders are finding it difficult to locate their borrowers to serve foreclosure papers as default rates skyrocket.
In one instance, the courts granted CIBC permission to email foreclosure papers to Xing Xiu Hua alias Xingxiu Hua after the lender alleged that the borrower “cannot be found after a diligent search and/or is evading personal service despite diligent attempts to serve”.
Subprime mortgage lender Reliable Mortgages Investment Corp has listed two Shaughnessy mansions and one Mount Pleasant duplex belonging to Hua as foreclosure sales.
BC Supreme Court ordered the sale of all for of Hua’s properties in 2017 after she reneged on a deal to buy a fifth property1.
Alternate mortgage lender Instanfund Mortgage Management Corp also seems to be having trouble locating one of its borrowers. Courts recently granted Instafund permission to serve borrower Jin Ji Wang foreclosure papers by email for a property at 1511 Errigal Place, West Vancouver, assessed at over $7 million.
The lender is alleging that the borrower owes nearly $3.5 million at an annual interest rate of 12%.
Subsequent court documents show that at least in CIBC’s case, the borrower did finally respond to the petition.
It seems that the Hua was simply busy attempting to settle nearly $10 million worth of debts by transferring money from the People’s Republic of China, according to the response filed.
Court filings show that there’s been an uptick in foreclosures in the Metro Vancouver region.
For example, Reliable Mortgages Investment Corp has filed 18 foreclosure proceedings in BC Supreme Court in the first eight months of 2019.
This is in contrast to 13 in the first eight months of 2018 and just eight in the first eight months of 2017.
This doesn’t really surprise me. Recently a friend of mine experienced some shenanigans where the owners of the place she was renting in Burnaby tried to kick everyone out while selling the place. She was worried about finding the address of the new owners, so she could continue paying rent, so I pulled the deed transfer for her. Both the old owners and the new owners listed the property as their own address, even though they were both using it as a rental property. Also, it turned out that the people she had been paying rent to (who lived in the basement suite) weren’t actually the owners.
I dug a little deeper into the mortgages, and it turns out both the old owner and the new owner had maxed-out subprime mortgages against the property. On both mortgages, they listed the property as their address, with no other contact details. I suspect this is a very common tactic in the current market. Buy a property, say you’re living there (for all kinds of tax breaks), and put it down as your address on the subprime mortgage you take out so it’s next to impossible to track you down later.
What does slightly amaze me is that both these mortgages were held by major banks, not subprime lenders.