Legal Description Necessary for AOMs?

Question

Recently I had a seller send me an Assignment of Mortgage (NJ) without an attachment or any reference to a legal description.

In my experience, I've always seen AOMs refer to "Exhibit A," which contains the full legal description of the property or the sellers have incorporated the legal description into the AOM itself.

In the current situation, I asked our foreclosing attorney if our AOM needed the legal description. She replied that it was only necessary to reference the original mortgage in the AOM.

We recorded the AOM and I thought that this was a much better way to do things. As long as the legal description is described in the original mortgage, you should never worry about repeating it in future AOMs. I've seen many situations where legal descriptions or other info gets messed up in AOMs, which causes problems. I say avoid the issue altogether and don't put stuff in there that people get wrong frequently.

Other opinions or thoughts out there? Especially interested in what other attorneys from different states have to say.

Rene Owczarski · Answer

At least for Polk County where I'm at, the assignments don't reference the legal description, but it does reference the original mortgages Book and Page, and sometimes the instrument number from the original mortgages recording stamp.

Chris Seveney · Answer

@Andy Mirza

Typically do not see them - if they do what most do is take a “screen shot” from the description in the mortgage and paste that into exhibit A

Andy Mirza · Answer

@Chris Seveney The "copying & pasting" is I usually see.

However, any mistakes make defects in title. I've seen incorrect legal descriptions lots of times, even with the original mortgage. If you include it only in the original mortgage, at least you're potentially affecting only one document. When you have a chain assignment of 10 different lenders, the mistake gets amplified and each AOM needs to be corrected.