Mortgage firm gets Courtney Love's house

OLYMPIA — Courtney Love's historic bungalow now belongs to a mortgage company after no one bid on the property Friday during a foreclosure auction.

Los Angeles-based WMC Mortgage filed a lawsuit last year in Thurston County Superior Court seeking foreclosure after Love stopped paying the bills. The final balance on the home totaled $386,000, which includes court costs, sheriff's fees and interest, said Thurston County sheriff's Sgt. Dan McLendon of the agency's civil division.

McLendon said he expected a bigger turnout after fielding about 100 calls during the week from people who expressed interest in the property. It was an unusually high number of calls, probably because of the owner's celebrity status, he said.

"We had a ton of calls. It really kind of shocked me. We anticipated a lot of folks coming out," he said.

The Sheriff's Office administers the auctions every Friday at the courthouse.

Love, widow of the late Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain, purchased the property in 1997 for Cobain's family. Love was named in the foreclosure suit as a trustee of the Courtney Love family trust. She stopped paying the mortgage in December 2003, court documents say.

Cobain's sister, Kim, was listed as the resident. She moved out before the auction, McLendon said.

The home was built in 1903 by Thomas Bordeaux, who in the early 1900s owned a successful lumber company that cut timber from the Black Hills. The home sits on 13 acres.

It is one of the last remaining structures from the town of Bordeaux, which was demolished when the logging operation closed in 1941, according to county records. The gabled, bungalow-style home is listed on the local historical inventory.

Love also is registered as the owner of a second property east of Olympia, according to the Thurston County Assessor's Office Web site.

The foreclosure accompanied legal and financial troubles that have plagued Love, 41, the past few years. She has been in and out of court, for reasons that include custody of her daughter with Cobain, Frances Bean. Love temporarily lost custody in October 2003, when she was arrested for breaking a window at her ex-boyfriend's home and for overdosing on painkillers.

The actress and former lead singer of Hole spoke in well-publicized interviews of having financial problems and claimed she and her daughter had been swindled out of about $40 million by a "fiduciary institution."

With the property, WMC Mortgage takes on $7,800 in back property tax, including payments owed from 2004, according to the county auditor's Web site.

A representative of the mortgage company could not be reached for comment.

"I don't know what their intentions are going to be, but my guess is they would probably turn it over to a local Realtor to sell it so they can recoup their funds," McLendon said.

Olympia was home to Cobain during Nirvana's early years, and it is where he wrote many of the band's songs. Cobain, who committed suicide in 1994, grew up in Aberdeen and moved to Olympia at age 20.