Oppenheim Law Special Report

Hi, this is foreclosure, defense attorney, and real estate attorney Roy Oppenheim. As many of you know, I’ve been practicing law for 30 years, and I have to tell you this is a first and it’s probably going to be the first for all of you too. The United States government, through the U.S. Department of Treasury and a division called FinCEN along with the FBI, announced that starting March 1st, they will be policing secret real estate sales that effectively do not disclose who the actual buyer of a real estate transaction is, in Miami-Dade county as well as in New York City.

Those transactions will be for those that have a purchase price in excess of 1 million dollars and are purchased for cash. In the “New York Times,” they’ve done an analysis recently of various condominiums that got purchased in New York city where, in fact, these kinds of transactions occur regularly where one has no idea who the true purchaser is, and many of them are folks overseas, international transactions. And indeed, some of them may be using illicit cash, and it is that cash that the United States government through the FBI and the Treasury are going to try and be policing.

The interesting part is that they’re going to be using people like me and my title company to do the policing. And so we are just dumbfounded, and absolutely flabbergasted, that the title industry is somehow being invoked into this process and have become the law enforcers. No one has ever deputized us to do this, no one has paid us to do this, and so this is going to be every interesting and I keep you abreast. Roy Oppenheim, in the trenches. Thank you.