That was the holding of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an opinion issued on Thursday in Dow Family, LLC v. PHH Mortgage Corporation, 2014 WI 56. The facts of the case are similar to thousands of foreclosure cases prosecuted in Wisconsin every year, but with a couple of interesting twists, which we summarized in a prior post. Essentially, in 2009 the owner of the property, Dow Family, LLC, had relied on the sellers' inaccurate representations that a mortgage had been satisfied. When PHH Mortgage sought to foreclose that mortgage, Dow looked for ways to contest the foreclosure.
Only one of Dow's arguments caught the Supreme Court's attention. When PHH commenced the foreclosure, the mortgagee of record was MERS, as nominee for U.S. Bank, the...
