And this is why you want to use a good title company and a good escrow company when you are buying or selling a house. It's their job to catch these things, and to know how to get it resolved.

Good agents know who's good in your area.

The upshot for us agents is that we've got something new to worry about when we're selling a home.

If there is one of these zombie liens on the property, the issue needs to be resolved before we can close the sale.

Since there is no easy resolution, that could easily make the home unsellable.

This is a bad situation.

And solutions are not going to be easy and will most likely be unfair.

And because most people don't keep documentation from 20 years ago, proving that the loan was forgiven is very, very challenging for most people.

And so, now, it appears that people who got notified that their loan is forgiven suddenly have collection agencies calling them, threatening them, filing liens against their property, and generally engaging in all sorts of perfectly legal activity to collect these (now 20-year-old) mortgages.

Anyway, what appears to have happened is that these mortgages that were forgiven and/or restructured were still on the banks books as bad debts.

It's standard practice to sell bad debts to collection agencies for pennies on the dollars. Collections makes money if they manage to collect that debt.

((Full disclosure, though: I never would have gotten my mortgage if not for the permissive nature of lending at the time. I had a very recent bankruptcy on my record and was a high-risk, sub-prime borrower.))

(This, BTW, was not without controversy. People like me who read the terms of our mortgages and didn't take out one we couldn't afford got no mortgage assistance. The government rewarded bad behavior in an effort to keep the whole economy from collapsing.)

One aspect of that bailout was that lenders who restructured or forgave a mortgage that someone couldn't pay ("restructure" is just fancy talk for lower the payments either by cutting the rate or extending the term) got a huge tax credit. A lot of lenders did so, letting people keep their homes.

In 2008, the mortgage markets seized. No one could get a loan as major lenders imploded and the secondary market realized that their "high quality" mortgage-backed securities were worthless.

The federal government responded with a bailout.

People where reportedly unaware that introductory rates were not the real rate.

People were, in fact, allowed to take out loans without documenting enough income to pay it.

Because the market was red-hot, anyone who got in over their heads could just sell.

Then it crashed.

During the housing bubble of the early 2000's, a lot of people took out mortgages that they actually couldn't afford. Laws were different back then, and a lot of now-illegal practices were happening.

No real surprises here. Last week was a short week and things are normally quiet this time of year. We'll see how things look once January gets rolling.

Don't wait for mortgage rates to come down. Lock in today. You can always re-lock if they fall before you sign loan docs. But it's very possible that today's "high" rates (relative to recent months) will look low in another few months.