It was August, and Crest Properties had just bought a 3,100-square-foot house at 1614 Meadowlark Landing Drive in the Lawing Pond neighborhood in Charlotte. The subsidiary of Indianapolis-based Timberstone Homes had planned to renovate, and then sell, the 4-year-old home. With the home-construction industry suffering, Crest has been buying up unsold homes of other builders [...]
A state Superior Court judge has ruled against a Matthews real estate broker accused of defending homeowners in foreclosures cases without being authorized to practice law. The ruling, which was handed down in June, is the latest in a string of legal setbacks for Dianne Michele Carter. In making the ruling, Judge Paul Gessner supported [...]
The North Carolina attorney general’s office and other agencies have requested documents related to deed scams in Mecklenburg County, Register of Deeds David Granberry has told The Mecklenburg Times. Granberry would not name which agencies besides the attorney general’s office are investigating cases of erroneous documents filed in his office, but sources have told The [...]
North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper has obtained a court order to stop a group of six people and some trusts from filing fraudulent deeds on foreclosed homes for sale in Raleigh, Wake Forest and Apex. The alleged scam is similar to an erroneous-deed problem that has been affecting the Charlotte area. The Mecklenburg Times [...]
When someone files a deed for a property they don’t actually own with the office of Mecklenburg County Register of Deeds David Granberry, there’s nothing Granberry can do to stop it. Granberry could know the deed is not legit, that the claim for the house is false. Still, his office doesn’t have the power to [...]
Registers of deeds battling erroneous deeds filed in the name of the Moorish Science Temple of America will get no intervention from the state — at least for now. In the wake of a July 5 Mecklenburg Times story on the scam, state Sen. Tommy Tucker, R-Waxhaw, tried Thursday to introduce emergency legislation to curtail [...]
When Charlotte attorney Bob Hull learned about fraudulent deeds being filed at metro area courthouses, his initial reaction was that it would create a title nightmare. But he’s changed his mind. “The more I think about it, I believe this should not really turn out to be so much of a title problem,” said Hull, [...]
It was a presentation Union County Sheriff’s Office attorney Bill McGuirt never thought he would have to give. “Larceny of a house: Who would have ever thought of such a thing?” McGuirt said as he began a presentation this month to the Union County Realtors Association. McGuirt’s presentation aimed to teach real estate agents about [...]
On June 1, a real estate agent was showing a house to a couple in the Union County town of Weddington. While the couple checked out the basement of the house in the 1000 block of Antioch Woods Lane, two men, Asaru A. Ali and Kenneth W. Lewis, suddenly showed up, according to Detective Brian [...]
