Expired foreclosure clock leaves Nationstar with no path back to the lien
A New York appeals court ordered a Newburgh mortgage canceled from the record after the servicer's foreclosure window expired.
The Appellate Division, Second Department, reversed a lower court order on September 16, 2026, and granted summary judgment to the property owner in his action against Nationstar Mortgage. The decision turned on the Foreclosure Abuse Prevention Act (FAPA) - the 2022 state law that has steadily shut down strategies servicers once used to keep aging foreclosure actions alive.
The facts are clean. In 2009, a foreclosure action was filed against the property, and the complaint accelerated the full mortgage debt. Under New York's six-year statute of limitations for mortgage foreclosure, that started the clock. By 2015, the window had closed.
The borrower sued in 2017 under RPAPL 1501(4), which lets property owners ask a court to strip a mortgage from the record once the limitations period has run. He moved for summary judgment against Nationstar.
The lower court denied that motion in June 2018, finding the discontinuance of the 2009 foreclosure action raised a triable question - had dropping the case revoked the acceleration and reset the clock? Before FAPA, that argument had real legs. Servicers routinely discontinued stale foreclosures and filed new ones, and New York courts were divided on whether it worked.
FAPA changed the equation. Effective December 30, 2022, it amended CPLR 203(h) to bar any party from unilaterally waiving, postponing, canceling, tolling, reviving, or resetting the accrual of a mortgage limitations period. A companion amendment to CPLR 3217(e) spelled out that voluntarily discontinuing a foreclosure action does not restart the clock.
The borrower moved to renew his earlier motion on this change in law. The lower court denied renewal as untimely. The Second Department disagreed - no final judgment had been entered or enforced, so the motion was timely.
On the merits, the court found the borrower showed the debt was accelerated in 2009, the six-year period expired in 2015, and any new foreclosure action would be time-barred. Nationstar challenged FAPA's retroactive application and constitutionality. The court rejected both as "without merit," citing Court of Appeals decisions and Article 13. The panel was unanimous.
For servicers managing aged New York foreclosure inventory, the takeaway is concrete: FAPA's ban on limitations-period resets continues to hold on appeal, constitutional objections included, and mortgages tied to stale foreclosures face cancellation exposure.
