forclosures up 97%

[Duke41]

I am a real estate broker and witnessed first hand how the mortgage crisis developed. The market price for housing was rising at a steady 20% clip from 2001-2005. The subprime lenders were coming up with programs to allow everyone and anyone to buy a home. There were two common scenarios first there were homebuyers with little or no down payment. They would typically get this 20/80 loans the idea there was to avoid PMI insurance, with a cheaper alternative and at the time PMI could not be deducted from you taxes as could the interest from each end of the 20/80 loan. The 80% loan was very close to the going rate at the time and the 20% loan was a few 3-5 points higher. The idea was to get into the home wait until the value rose enough for you to have 20% equity and then refi into a 30 yr fixed at a lower rate. There are two major flaws with this plan. First most of the 80% loans were variable rate locked for 3 years, second the home values did not increase as thought but actually decreased in value. So this has lead us to the current crisis were the loans have adjusted to higher rates and there is not enough equity in the home to refi out of the loan and into a better rate.

The other scenario was the folks were taking interest only loans so they could afford a larger or better house. The idea was to have low payments and then as you earned more money or got you financial house on order you could do a refi and be okay. Also folks brought property this way with the intent to flip the house after a year or two and make big bucks. Again the got caught in a declining market and can not refi into a better loan because they have no equity in their home.

I also heard about shady mortgage brokers and raw deals for uneducated buyers and in 2004 pulled my buyer out if a closing upon reviewing the HUD and noticing that the interest rate was 1 point higher and the closing costs were 50% higher than what was promised.

So where does this leave the folks in trouble. You have a few options. The first of which should be to call your bank and tell them you need to redo your loan. The banks will do, this I have helped folks so far with CITI Mortgage and Washington Mutual. The next choice would be a short sale.. that is a bank approved sale for less than whats owed the bank. I have done 6 of these since October. They are doable if your property and yourself hit the right criteria. Third you can let the place go into foreclosure, this is a tough decision as the banks will bury your credit rating. However if you were treated unfairly or there is any issue with your loan documents or with the HUD you have state agencies in MASS and RI that will get involved and help you get things straightened out.

If you or anyone you know needs some help with this PM me and I can point you in the right direction. Also Clammer is very experienced as well. Don't let the bastards get you down they act like they are holding all the cards.. trust me they aren't.

[Raven]

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[tlapinski]

Interesting thread... I work for the largest FCL law firm in CT. I have been here for just over 4 years now and have seen things from many different sides. Just after I started working , we had to cut back a LOT of employees because there just wasn't enough business. On a "good" week, we would get 50 referals (new foreclosure actions). Now, on a very slow day, we have over 100 referals. We cut back to about 50 employees and a handful of attorneys in the slow days, to now having over 150 employees, 20+ attorneys, and we are still growing. While the topic of the day is the rising foreclosure rate and shows like 20/20 and 60 minutes want to jump all over the lenders for screwing things up, they are not completely to blame. Lenders gave too much money to people that shouldn't get it AND people took advantage of this and took out loans that were too big AND the mortgage brokers taking advantage of this scenario. I had one FCL over this past summer. The debtor had an odd last name, so it stuck with me. On Saturday of his auction, I happened to be reading the local paper. There was a cover story about this guy and his situation. His mortgage broker fudged his loan applications to make it look like he was making more money than he was, deposited something like $10K of her own money into his account, then pulled it after the closing. He was making something like $1200 a month at the casino, and he had a $2500+ per month mortgage. Yeah, that didn't last long. Who is to blame there????

Then you have the dirtbags that took out these loans a couple years back on a bunch of multi-family homes, collected rent from the tenants, and never paid a dime back to the bank. There are ways to drag out a foreclosure action for years and years. All this time you keep collecting rent, not paying the mortgage, and getting rich. Sure, your credit is pretty much screwed for life, but you now have a giant pile of cash sitting in your bank account. I have seen this So many times that it is sickening. There is actually a guy in the SW part of Ct that has over 100 loans in FCL. He went around a few years back buying properties below value from mentally disabled people that were falling into financial trouble. He basically bought the property at a lowere than market price to bail them out, jacked up their rent which, evicted them, then brought in new tenants and kept all of their rent. He has a great scheme going because he is so experienced in what banks will take for a short sale just to recoup something. I Googled his name one day just to see what I could find. It was all I could do not to speak my mind to him when he and I spoke a short time later.

The stage of the FCL that I handle involves the actual auctioning off of your home. I deal with people at the end of the line and have heard and seen just about everything. We even had a guy compeltely level his home to stop the foreclosure. He took out demo permits with the town, hired a demo crew, and left a parking lot in place of the house. Funny thing, it worked for a while. The bank eventually settled with him by accepting a short sale just so they could recover something. Some days I think about writing a book on how to prolong the foreclosure process....

[Raven]

Tlapinske wrote: Some days I think about writing a book on how to prolong the foreclosure process....


talk about SCAMS !!x 10

if nothing else you should be interviewed on TV

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