Woman 'buys,' renovates wrong home

This post comes from Marilyn Lewis of MSN Money.

A Memphis TV station is telling the story of a hideous real-estate mix-up. Terry Jordan of Tate County, Miss., thought she was doing everything right to help her family out of a financial pinch when she bought a foreclosure property and poured money into it. She and her unemployed husband planned to sell it for a profit.

She has since learned, however, that the home she bought -- or thought she'd bought -- and renovated doesn't really belong to her. The real-estate agent actually sold her a different home, one on the lot next door, which Jordan had not visited.  

WREG 3 TV in Memphis reports that the realty company says it got bad information about the home from the mortgage company. But no one appears willing to help Jordan.

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Jordan told the TV station that a real-estate agent escorted her through a small home in Senatovia, Miss., with a for-sale sign. The agent opened the home's door with keys retrieved from a lock box on the property. The house appears to have two bedrooms and a bonus room, a good-sized lot and a barn. Jordan returned to view it twice more and then purchased it, the station says.

ABC News says the home was listed for $11,500 and that Jordan bought it for $10,500.

WREG TV reporter Wayne Carter describes the sale property's listing sheet:

It shows a picture of the house. Describes it accurately. You go there, you go inside. You wind up buying it just as it's listed here, but all the details, even the address, were wrong. Turns out you own a house you've never seen.

I said, 'What?'

The ownership problem surfaced only after Jordan spent "thousands of dollars," adding a new roof, rewiring the home and fixing the plumbing, the station says. She'd ordered a survey after noticing that the home's paperwork at city hall didn't "look right." The home, it turns out, was never for sale. It just happened to be empty and was next door to the property that should have been listed.

Jordan spoke with the agent who sold her the home. "She's like, 'I don't know how to tell you this but we might have sold you the wrong house,'" Jordan told the station. "I said, 'What?'"

There are a lot of unanswered questions here. Meanwhile, Jordan appears to have kept her sense of humor remarkably well. She laughs incredulously as she tells the station that "the whole purpose of us doing this was to have another income."

What about the house she actually bought? She told Carter:

It's half this size. It's pitiful the lot that it sits on. The house is full of mold.

She only wants to get back the money she spent on the house, Jordan told ABC News.

But "no lawyer has been willing to deal with all the red tape for such a small payoff," WREG says.

Still a mess

The Huffington Post, commenting on the story, points out that after years of mortgage crisis, "banks are still showing signs of disorganization on all things foreclosure."

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HuffPo tells of other mortgage fiascos. Some took place before state attorneys general settled  with five big banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Ally Financial, the company formerly called GMAC) this spring to stop improprieties in mortgage servicing. Some took place after. Among the stories:

• A Houston couple were threatened with foreclosure last fall even though they're current on their payments. The problem: The title to the property was never transferred into their name when they bought it in 2008.
• A Pasco County, Fla., couple faced foreclosure "not for missing a payment but for sending one in too early" one month and using the wrong routing number the next month.
• In Northampton, Mass., last June a man "got a letter stating his home would be seized if he didn't pay up zero dollars and zero cents!" reported News 22 WWLP.

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