The mayor is attempting to reform the tax lien sale. Sound acquainted?
I’m undecided what’s worse — that the town applied such a flawed debt-collection course of or that it has failed for many years to repair it. How onerous can this be?
“It’s a really troublesome balancing act,” tax lien sale knowledgeable Jennifer Polovetsky told The Real Deal final month. OK, perhaps it’s onerous. However nonetheless. This has taken perpetually.
The problem dates again to 1996, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani had the town start promoting property liens to traders as a result of it was awful at gathering debt and managing buildings it had seized.
Two months in the past, the Metropolis Council passed bills that would ultimately permit a land belief quite than personal traders to foreclose on indebted properties. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who helps that effort, this week suspended the lien sale for six months to overview the method, which he had campaigned towards.
The Adams and de Blasio administrations went down the identical highway and ended up nearly the place they began.
Everybody agrees that individuals shouldn’t be dropping properties which can be value excess of their unpaid water payments or different money owed. And in the event that they do lose them, they need to be paid the difference between the sale worth and the debt — because the U.S. Supreme Court docket ruled in Tyler v. Hennepin County, Minnesota, in 2023.
However the objective is rarely to get to that time. It’s to gather the debt with out foreclosures.
Which brings us to Filmore Brown.
I regarded into an East Flatbush resident’s case this week as a result of Legal professional Basic Letitia James had made Brown the poster little one of her name final yr for lien sale reform. I used to be curious. Who purchased Brown’s three-family? Was he in a position to get it again?
First, I wanted an deal with. Googling “Filmore Brown Brooklyn” turned up protection of his plight. A News 12 report had mentioned the house was on East 89th Road. Within the background of an ABC7 clip I noticed the home quantity, 227.
Now I may verify property data. They confirmed a referee had bought the three-family residence to an LLC on June 16, 2025, for $735,000.
I regarded deeper.
Brown had purchased the property in 1996 with a $216,000 mortgage that he paid off in 2019. The media reported that — however missed that in 2014, his residence at 227 East 89th Road and a whole lot of different Brooklyn properties appeared on a tax lien sale certificate. I discovered Brown’s home on web page 116. The lien quantity was $7,397.60.
That didn’t match the $5,000 determine that Brown had shared with reporters. I stored digging.
I discovered one other tax lien sale certificates, dated 2019. Brown’s residence was on page 82, with a debt of $5,567.87.
This was the one which led to the sale of his residence and his outstanding point out in Tish James’ op-ed.
Brown had advised reporters that he was shocked that the house had been bought with out his data — and that he solely came upon when males despatched by the brand new proprietor tried to drill out the locks.
He failed to say that his residence had been on the tax lien sale checklist earlier than. His lawyer, Alice Nicholson, advised me she didn’t find out about that. She surmised that Brown’s mortgage lender had paid the 2014 debt to keep away from foreclosures, however didn’t rescue him the subsequent time as a result of Brown had paid off the mortgage.
So, Filmore Brown may not be the most effective instance of an harmless sufferer. However we will nonetheless study one thing from his case.
In some unspecified time in the future he had reportedly missed a $600 water invoice. In my expertise, anybody counting on the Postal Service to ship payments is at excessive danger of not getting them.
The debt was bought and disappeared from the DEP’s system, so Brown reportedly didn’t see it when he paid subsequent water payments. With charges and curiosity, it ballooned. However water payments are issued quarterly or month-to-month, so Brown ought to have seen the arrears earlier than a lien was issued and bought.
That mentioned, the massive drawback with the tax lien sale is that whoever buys the debt has an incentive to not accumulate it. In Brown’s case, the lienholder, which property data present was Financial institution of New York Mellon servicer MTAG, tacked on penalties and curiosity till it grew to $5,567, then foreclosed and bought his home for $735,000.
Did Brown actually not get any notices, together with one allegedly hand-delivered to somebody at his deal with? Maybe his tenants received them and threw them out. Nevertheless it’s potential he missed them by design, given the creditor’s incentive to promote the house for an enormous revenue if the debt went unpaid. Brown’s lawyer mentioned he’s in state courtroom difficult the service as improper and stays within the residence.
As for the East Flatbush three-family residence, I traced the LLC that purchased it to Malka Lax of Monroe, New York. Lax and different traders behind the LLC, who Nicholson mentioned purchase lots of properties in foreclosures, promptly received a $717,000 mortgage from Broadview Capital, aka Broadview Funding, of Nice Neck. No transactions have been recorded since.
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