by Jim the Realtor | Feb 4, 2011 | Loan Mods, Short Sales, Strategic Defaults |
Hat tip to KK for sending this along, from the Huffington Post – a story that follows people through the loan-mod maze, and highlights how the servicers are making the walk-away problem worse:
While walking away is a frightening and dangerous step into the unknown, millions have beaten the path in the past few years. To find out what it’s like to walk away, The Huffington Post asked readers who were considering making the move, or who had already done so, to write in and share their stories. That was in January 2010. A year later, we followed up with them to see how they reflected on the experience.
We initially heard from 58 people from all over the country who fit the criteria. Ten of them have become unreachable over the past year, but the remaining 48 were eager to share their stories. A year later, only eight of them are still paying their mortgage. Almost universally, the homeowners we spoke with took personal responsibility for their situations, declining to blame the banks or politicians. Yet nearly all of them faced similar struggles in their attempts to work with their banks: lost paperwork and little interest in finding a financial compromise.
The story is four pages, here are the best quotes:
1. “There should be support groups for people who have to deal with these banks,” said Richmond Burton, 50, a soon-to-be-former resident of Long Island’s East Hampton. “It can drive you crazy. I’m very good at dealing with pressure, and they made it feel like you’re at their mercy.”
2. “We get daily calls from creditors and banks that threaten this and that, and I just laugh knowing I am helping to bring down the system that has brought us all down and continues to reap giant profits at the expense of the little guy,” said one.
3. Burton went more than a year without paying his mortgage before persuading the bank to accept a short sale. “The mortgage company was not wiling to work with me. The businesses that we have created to serve us are enslaving us. They’re not listening to us, they don’t even pretend to care about us. Really, our only option is to do what I’m doing, which is to fire them all. I’m doing everything I can to remove them from my life,” he said.
4. Soto, a conservative Republican, said he has come to terms with his choice. “It was a tough decision. We thought about it and thought about it. I want to do the honorable thing, but wait a minute here — I didn’t get respect from the mortgage companies when I was asking for help. Now here we are, we bailed everybody out,” he said. “Am I just supposed to be the good Samaritan and just stay there? I asked the mortgage company, ‘What’s gonna keep me from giving you the keys?'”
5. In July 2009, on the informal advice of a bank representative, the Kluzes stopped paying their mortgage to encourage their bank to approve a short sale. The bank initially accepted a short sale offer, but the couple was told that investors had later rejected it. The bank suggested Shelley Kluz apply for a modification, apparently unaware she’d been trying for the past year. She did so anyway and was rejected. “We are in a weird limbo state of waiting. So, long story short, we are walking away. We are so fed up with this whole process,” she wrote at the time.
Six months later, she and her family moved out, a year after they stopped paying. For $1,550, she said, they now rent a three-bedroom, two-bath home with a yard in the front and back — a feature their first home, with a monthly mortgage payment of $2,250, did not have. The new home is twice the size of the old one with twice as many bathrooms. Their old home was foreclosed upon a month after they left and, Shelley Kluz said, is still on the market for $142,000 (they paid $325,000 in 2004 for the house in Vacaville, CA). They only moved five minutes away, and she still drives by it occasionally. Her 7-year-old has taken it the hardest, having known no other home, she said.
“It was the best thing we could have done. Since we walked away, our house has only dropped further and we had no hope of getting out from under it,” she said. Now, “We actually have available spending money to do fun things with our family, we pay less money for a completely finished house, my kids have a backyard with grass, and best of all, we can breathe.”
6. “I feel like we have a stigma on things like bankruptcy, but those people shouldn’t feel ashamed,” Phillips said. “Yes, some people abuse, like Teresa on ‘Real Housewives,’ but I’m hoping everyday people who are going through this can find some strength in what I’ve done and ask, ‘Why should I care about the bank if the bank doesn’t care about me?'” Despite his bankruptcy, he said, he has more offers for credit cards than he can handle.
7. Having worked as a loan assistant, Andrea told HuffPost she initially thought she’d be able to navigate the system. “I figured I would be well-equipped in my knowledge from my previous job about how to figure it out,” she said, “and I was shocked honestly at their level of disinterest — it was either disinterest on their part in working it out, or lack a of just being organized. But to me, them not being organized to work it out was a symptom of there not being a financial incentive for them to work it out.”
Terence Edwards, a Fannie executive, said in a June statement. Edwards said homeowners who strategically default or fail to work “in good faith” to avert foreclosure would be ineligible for new Fannie Mae-backed mortgages for seven years. Freddie Mac, Fannie’s government-owned counterpart, has adopted the same policy.
Fannie, in its statement, also warned it would pursue “deficiency judgments” in court that would allow it to recoup from borrowers the difference between the value of a home in foreclosure and the outstanding loan a bank still has on its books. After inflating the bubble until it burst, banks essentially now want to be insulated from their mistakes by dunning borrowers for every last penny. Deficiency judgments are allowed in 39 states and were a nagging concern to many of the homeowners we spoke to.
The IRS may also loom over homeowners who walk away. Under current law, thanks to a measure spearheaded by Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.) in 2007, the IRS cannot come after homeowners after they walk away. Before that law took effect, if a bank took, say, a $200,000 hit on a foreclosed home and “forgave” the debt, that forgiveness would be counted as taxable income for the former homeowner. A note to the fence-sitters: Miller’s law expires at the end of 2012.
by Jim the Realtor | Feb 2, 2011 | Loan Mods, Mortgage Lawsuits |
From HW:
A California appeals court ruled that a former homeowner’s lawsuit against U.S. Bank for fraud may continue after the bank allegedly reneged on a promise to negotiate a mortgage modification, opening the door for claims from potentially thousands of similarly situated troubled borrowers in the Golden State.
While the court ruled that a case for fraud–which includes claims for damages–could proceed, it also ruled that the homeowner, Claudia Jacqueline Aceves, lacked sufficient cause to get her home back after the foreclosure sale.
What could become a landmark foreclosure ruling appears to be both a win and a loss, for mortgage servicers and foreclosure defense attorneys alike. Mortgage servicers prevailed on issues of alleged defects in the foreclosure process, with the court ruling that none of the Aceves allegations of irregularities “would permit the trial court to void the deed of sale or otherwise invalidate the foreclosure.” Aceves had claimed, for example, that the notice of default was defective and therefore void, a claim the court rejected outright. “Absent prejudice, the error does not warrant relief,” according to the ruling.
The court spent most of its 15-page ruling, however, discussing how U.S. Bank had purportedly promised to negotiate a potential loan modification if the homeowner agreed to allow the bank to lift a bankruptcy stay, which had protected the home from seizure. Yet, when the homeowner agreed and attempted to begin negotiation on a loan modification, the bank allegedly opted to foreclose without negotiating.
For homeowners, the case affirms their ability to go after banks and mortgage lenders for monetary damages when lenders promise to negotiate mortgage modifications but fail to do so in good faith.
Read full details of story here.
by Jim the Realtor | Jan 19, 2011 | Loan Mods, MERS, Psycho-babble |
She doesn’t say it specifically, but this should be the first step in resolving the MERS/robo-signing debacle with well-rounded settlements for all – from MND:
Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) Chairman Sheila C. Bair called today for a “foreclosure claims commission” to address complaints from homeowners who have been harmed by flaws in the foreclosure process. This was one of several improvements suggested by Bair, an outspoken critic of the servicing industry, at a “summit” on Mortgage Servicing for the 21st Century sponsored by the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA).
Bair said that throughout the mortgage crisis “the most persistent adversary has been inertia in the servicing and foreclosure practices applied to problem loans,” and that prompt action to modify unaffordable subprime loans in 2007 could have helped to limit the crisis in its early stages. Still, 18 months into an economic recovery and with hundreds of thousands of mortgage modifications completed, “mortgage markets remain deeply mired in a cycle of credit distress, securitization markets remain frozen, and now chaos in mortgage servicing and foreclosure is introducing a dangerous new uncertainty into this fragile market.”
Bair spoke, as she has several times in recent months, of misaligned incentives in the servicing business model which she said drove the origination of trillions of dollars of unaffordable subprime and Alt-A mortgages that triggered the crisis. Now, she said, the fixed fee structure based on volume does not provide sufficient incentives to effective manage large volume of problem loans during a period of crisis. “Mortgage servicers have remained behind the curve as the problem has evolved to include underwater mortgages and, now, foreclosure practices that sow confusion and fear on the part of homeowners and fail to fully conform to state and local legal requirements.”
This compensation structure drove automation, cost cutting, and consolidation to the point where the market share of the top five servicers has gone from 32 percent to almost 60 percent since 2000. “When mortgage defaults began to mount in 2007 and 2008, third-party servicers were left without the expertise, the contractual flexibility, the financial incentive, or the resources they needed to engage in effective loss-mitigation programs.”
Responding to the crisis, Bair said, requires all parties involved to recognize that loss mitigation is not just socially desirable, it is wholly consistent with safe and sound banking and has macroeconomic consequences. “The bottom line is that we need more modifications and fewer foreclosures. When foreclosure is unavoidable, we need it to be done with all fairness to the borrower and in accordance with the law. Only by committing to these principles can we begin to move past the foreclosure crisis and rebuild confidence in our housing and mortgage markets.
The foreclosure claims commission envisioned by Bair would follow the model used to settle claims arising out of the BP oil spill and the events of 9/11. It would be set up and funded by servicers to address claims submitted by homeowners who have wrongly suffered foreclosure through servicing errors. Bair said that many in the servicing industry will resist such a settlement because of the immediate financial cost, “but every time servicers have delayed needed changes to minimize their short-term costs, they have seen a deepening of the crisis that has cost them – and the rest of us – even more.”
by Jim the Realtor | Jan 11, 2011 | Loan Mods, Mortgage Qualifying, Tips, Advice & Links |
Hat tip to Trisha for sending along this article by Lynnley Browning in the nytimes.com:
Homeowners looking to lower their monthly mortgage payments and also save some on interest may be able to do so without all the hefty fees and daunting credit requirements of refinancing.
A little-known strategy, called “recasting,” or “re-amortization,” is available through some mortgage lenders and servicers.
It involves paying off a lump sum of the principal amount and asking to have the monthly payments reset according to the original interest rate and loan terms.
The lump sum reduces the principal, so your new monthly payments decrease slightly and you save on interest paid over the life of the loan.
Lenders typically charge an administrative fee of $150 or more for this service, though borrowers are not required to pay closing costs or submit to another credit check, because they are not asking for a new loan.
Recasting works well for those unable to qualify for refinancing amid the ever-toughening credit guidelines — perhaps because they are self-employed or have less-than-stellar credit — as well as for those with extra cash, like a year-end bonus.
“People don’t really know about it,” said Alan Rosenbaum, the founder and chief executive of the Guardhill Financial Corporation in New York, “but it’s become more common recently.”
Although the term “recasting” is often used by the mortgage industry to refer to interest-rate resets on adjustable-rate mortgages, here the interest rate and loan term stay the same.
Here’s how it might work. Let’s say that as of late December, you had just over $230,449 of principal left on a 30-year fixed-rate loan for $300,000 taken out at 7.93 percent in 1995. You have been paying just under $2,187 a month in principal and interest. But if you put in $20,000 toward that remaining principal and asked your lender to reamortize your payments over the remaining 15 years on the loan, your monthly payment would drop by $52, to around $2,135. Putting in $100,000 would save $730 a month and bring payments to $1,457.
Making extra payments toward the principal while not asking the bank to recast a loan keeps monthly payments the same and merely shortens the time it takes to pay off the loan.
by Jim the Realtor | Jan 11, 2011 | Loan Mods, Short Sales |
From the Boston Globe:
Even when faltering homeowners and their banks would both benefit by modifying mortgage terms or arranging a so-called “graceful exit’’ from an unsustainable loan, such negotiations haven’t become standard practice — and the arduous foreclosure process lurches forward, often through bureaucratic momentum alone.
One promising solution is for governments to make mediation automatic, by requiring that borrowers be given a chance to sit down with lenders and neutral third parties to attempt to work out a payment solution that is viable for all involved.
Mayor Menino is asking the Legislature to make the process automatic in looming foreclosure cases in Boston. Lawmakers should agree, and go a step further by making mediation automatic throughout the state for homeowners facing foreclosure. Similar laws have proved beneficial in Connecticut, Florida, and New York. Massachusetts should follow suit.
The foreclosure crisis has thrown millions of families into limbo, muddied the balance sheets of mortgage lenders, and threatened the recovery of the broader economy. Foreclosing on a home and maintaining it until it can be auctioned is costly for lenders; they’re often better off when they offer more affordable terms to a delinquent homeowner, or agree to terminate a mortgage amicably, perhaps through a short sale. But the necessary negotiations can be hard to bring about when the company that services the mortgage doesn’t actually own it — or when a mortgage holder has thousands of foreclosure cases on its hands.
That’s why mediation should be automatic. One study found that cities and states with mandatory mediation reported settlement rates approaching 75 percent. In these cases, lenders get an acceptable payment schedule rather than an empty house in a profoundly troubled housing market.
A program of automatic mediation also builds transparency and communication into the foreclosure process, which more often involves reams of paperwork, endless bureaucracy, and a dearth of human interaction.
by Jim the Realtor | Jan 5, 2011 | Loan Mods, Market Conditions, Shadow Inventory, Strategic Defaults |
From Diana Olick at cnbc.com:
I have argued many times that just because a loan is underwater (value of loan is higher than value of home) it doesn’t necessarily mean that the borrower will stop making timely payments.
Yes, the incentive to abandon the home is there, but for most homeowners, their home is their community, their daily life, and not just an investment. Most probably think the value will come back over time, and unless they desperately need to move, they have no reason to stop paying.
Amherst analysts disagree with me. “Borrower equity status is the single most important predictor of success,” they claim. To explain their premise, they use two definitions of performing loans: A “successful” loan is one that is always performing, re-performing or voluntarily prepaid. A “clean success” takes out the re-performing loans. Here’s what they found:
For loans with equity, 88.9% were successful after 2 years, and 84.4% represented a clean success.
For loans with CLTV >120, only 53.6% of loans were successful and only 40.9% represented a clean success.
We talk a lot about the shadow inventory of foreclosed properties overhanging the market and weighing down inventories, but the inventory of potential new defaults is clearly high; that potential, even with steady economic recovery, exists and must be factored into the equation.
The latest home price reports are not good, and even though sales appear to be bottoming in some markets, prices always lag. Also, many of the sales are foreclosures (around 30 percent), so that knocks the price recovery premise on its head as well.
by Jim the Realtor | Dec 29, 2010 | Loan Mods, MERS |
Hat tip to David for sending this along, from USA Today:
Steven and Tamara Gewecke are three years behind on their mortgage payments, but they’ve fought off foreclosure. The Minnesota couple refinanced in 2006 to start a business. It failed. Debts mounted. The Geweckes went bankrupt and failed to win a loan modification. But they bought time.
In 2009, the Geweckes filed a lawsuit to block their foreclosure. At the heart of their case is this question: Who owns their mortgage?
They allege the investor trust that claims to doesn’t because there’s no proper record of the mortgage’s transfer to the trust. Their complaint also alleges that the mortgage didn’t get to the trust until 18 months after the trust closed to new loans. If US Bank, the trustee, can’t prove ownership, it can’t foreclose, the Geweckes say.
The Geweckes want a loan modification so they can stay in their home of 16 years. Their current loan has an adjustable 9.25% interest rate. They owe more on the house than it’s worth.
They’re not looking for a “free ride,” says Steven, 40, who works in marketing. Neither do they want to pay off one firm and then face a future claim by another. They also hope their case will send a message to mortgage companies that they must obey rules, too.
“I understand that if you don’t make your payments, you’ll lose your home,” says Tamara Gewecke, 41. “But make sure you do it right. Make sure you’ve got your paperwork done.”
by Jim the Realtor | Dec 21, 2010 | Bailout, Loan Mods, Market Conditions |
Hat tip to both SM and RE for sending along the Wells Fargo announcement of neg-am bailouts. If principal reductions gain momentum (which is doubtful), the moral hazard would be hard to imagine – and it could start a revolution in the streets. From Eric at nctimes.com:
Wells Fargo & Co. agreed to modify $2 billion of mortgage loans and to pay $33 million to foreclosed California borrowers, the California Attorney General’s office said Monday.
The deal applies to borrowers with “pick-a-pay” loans, which typically included “teaser” periods of two to five years during which borrowers could make monthly payments for less than the monthly interest costs. At the end of the teaser period, interest rates could skyrocket, and outstanding balances were rolled into large fixed payments. This loan type became one of the hallmarks of the housing bubble because it allowed homebuyers to take out mortgages that far exceeded borrowers’ long-term ability to repay them.
“Customers were offered adjustable-rate loans with payments that mushroomed to amounts that ultimately thousands of borrowers could not afford,” Brown said in a written statement. “Recognizing the harm caused by these loans, Wells Fargo accepted responsibility and entered into this settlement with my office.”
The settlement includes loans made by World Savings Bank and Wachovia Bank, both of which were acquired by Wells Fargo when they failed. No loans made by Wells Fargo were covered by this deal.
Under the agreement, 14,900 former World Savings and Wachovia customers will be eligible for $2 billion in loan forgiveness, much of which will include principal forgiveness, the statement said. A separate statement from Wells Fargo said they’d be working with customers between Monday and June 30, 2013, and the loan modifications could be worth $2.4 billion.
Roughly 12,000 borrowers will be eligible for the $32 million settlement worth an average of $2,650 each, the statement said.
The company will contact customers eligible for modifications or settlement cash, and maintain a help line for customers at 888-565-1422.
The Wells Fargo statement said the bank anticipated making payments for roughly these amounts when they bought Wachovia in 2008.
“The majority of Wachovia’s Pick-a-Payment customers reside in California,” Mike Heid, co-president of Wells Fargo Home Mortgage, said in a separate written statement. “We’re pleased that going forward the attorney general’s office will assist with outreach, so that we can continue to work with as many customers as possible on the options available to them to prevent foreclosures.”
Wells Fargo came to similar agreements with nine other states, including Florida, Arizona and Nevada.
by Jim the Realtor | Nov 10, 2010 | Bailout, Loan Mods |
Excerpts regarding the fed/state plan for principal reductions, from latimes.com:
The most controversial part of the program, and the one most difficult for banks and investors to sign on to, dedicates $790 million to principal reduction. This would write down the value of an estimated 25,135 “underwater” mortgages, which are loans in which homeowners owe more on their properties than what they are worth.
The California plan — as well as programs created by Nevada and Arizona — would pay lenders $1 for every dollar of mortgage debt forgiven. Experts say reducing principal on such underwater loans would go far to reducing foreclosures in the three states because home values have fallen so steeply that homeowners are tempted to walk away from their obligations.
But the financial industry has been reluctant to participate in government-administered programs that would require them to reduce the amount that borrowers owe them.
“If you can’t do the principal write-down, you are limited in what you can do,” said Dan Immergluck, an associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who studied the different state plans developed with the federal bailout money.
“It is one thing for them to agree not to write down principal when they are being asked to foot the whole bill,” he said, “but when the states are agreeing to match this 50-50, it seems rather ridiculous of the servicers and the investors not to agree to this.”
(more…)
by Jim the Realtor | Oct 26, 2010 | Loan Mods |
Hat tip to Susie for sending in this latimes.com article:
For example, Jean C. Wilcox of Irvine has sued EMC Mortgage Corp., accusing it of stringing her along for three years while making several offers to modify her nearly $800,000 loan, losing documents repeatedly and never intending to permanently change the terms of the mortgage. An EMC spokesman declined to comment.
“It was just ‘extend and pretend,’ ” said Wilcox’s lawyer, Anthony Lanza of Irvine. “And it was like they had the fax machine hooked up to a shredder.”
Anaheim lawyer Damian Nassiri said his firm had filed about 100 lawsuits against mortgage lenders since 2007. Earlier suits alleged that lenders misrepresented terms of mortgages or engaged in other shady practices to foist abusive loans on borrowers. Most of his firm’s suits now accuse lenders of dealing in bad faith with borrowers who have become delinquent on loans.
Worse, Nassiri said, in cases where foreclosure was inevitable, banks misled borrowers into accepting trial loan modifications. The intent, he claimed, was “to get some kind of money out of them” while stalling actions to seize the homes.
“There are too many bad loans for the banks to handle, and they can’t dump all these properties out on the market all at once because we would have another Depression,” Nassiri said.
Similar allegations of breaches of contract and acting in bad faith have cropped up in lawsuits around the nation, said Anthony Laura, a Washington lawyer who represents lenders accused of wrongdoing and tracks litigation trends.
Some suits allege that the problem is so widespread that courts should certify the plaintiffs as representing an entire class of aggrieved borrowers. Wilcox’s suit, for example, seeks class-action status on behalf of other California borrowers with similar complaints about EMC.
Boston consumer lawyer Gary Klein, a longtime antagonist of mortgage lenders, has filed suits seeking class-action status against the top three loan servicers — Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. — and others.
A multidistrict panel of federal judges on Oct. 8 consolidated eight such suits, including two from California, for pretrial proceedings in federal court in Boston.
The suits allege that trial loan modifications extended by Bank of America under the Obama administration’s anti-foreclosure plan were contracts that the bank violated by denying permanent modifications to borrowers who fulfilled their obligations.
In court documents filed in one of the cases, Bank of America said the plaintiffs mistakenly believed they were guaranteed loan modifications if they made three trial payments under the government’s program.
“A borrower must actually qualify, including income verification, an analysis of the modified loan’s affordability and other factors,” the bank said in the filings.
Wilcox said she had about $250,000 in equity in her home when EMC first offered to modify her loan and would have sold the house had she not relied on the company’s promises for a permanent modification. Now it’s not clear whether any equity remains.
“You’re paying out all this money,” she said, “and all the time the value of your house keeps going down.”
