MFI-Miami was mentioned in a major NY Real Estate Website
December 25, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
On Tuesday afternoon and yesterday morning, I began getting calls from Long Island and the 5 boroughs that make up New York City. People kept telling me that they saw MFI-Miami on the web which isn’t uncommon but usually I know something is up when I get repeated calls from one specific area. Now I know what it is.
MFI-Miami was mentioned in the The Real Deal, an online Real Estate publication which has a New York edition and another for South Florida. I must admit I had never heard of them until today when I was doing an internet search. Their 2 sites are filled with all kinds of industry news and are very impressive. I would highly recommend them for mortgage or real estate professionals.
Here’s the blurb that appeared on December 23rd.
We now have people on the ground in Washington, D.C., MD & VA
December 8, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
MFI-Miami now has a Field Representative to cover the Washington, DC Metro area, Virgina and Maryland! Our new Field Representative is Columbus Williams and he will be MFI-Miami’s Regional Manager for the mid-Atlantic region of the US. His direct number is (301) 728-2634 or you can call the office number (301) 979-9577.
MFI-Miami was featured in the Boston Herald
November 24, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
Mortgage ’auditors’ help people fight foreclosure
By Jerry Kronenberg / Herald Highlight: Mortgages
Monday, November 24, 2008
Mary Everleigh nearly lost the house she’s owned since 1986 to a fast-talking financier - until Stephen Dibert combed through her mortgage papers and realized the woman had fallen for a scam.
“Steve laid out all of the documents and said, ‘You know, what? Something isn’t kosher here,’ ” said Everleigh, a Michigan homeowner. “It was a big eye-opener for me.”
Dibert, a former loan originator turned anti-scam sleuth, is expanding his Miami-based
Mortgage Fraud Investigations into Massachusetts - apparently becoming the first loan “auditor” to set up shop in the Bay State.
”This is a service that’s definitely needed in the Boston area,” said Dibert, one of a handful of mortgage auditors who’ve opened across the country in recent months. “We feel that the whole Eastern Seaboard is definitely underserved.”
Mortgage auditors review customers’ loan papers for forged signatures, sham home appraisals or other illegal acts.
Any wrongdoing can strengthen financially strapped homeowners’ hands in negotiations with lenders.
Many customers are seeking “loan modifications,” where banks agree to cut homeowners’ interest rate or otherwise change mortgage terms to help homeowners avoid foreclosure.
Others want lenders to OK “short sales,” where borrowers sell homes in today’s weak market for less than their unpaid mortgage balances and banks simply “eat” the difference.
Auditors also check paperwork covering a loan’s “securitization,” the process under which lenders bundle up hundreds of mortgages into big bonds later sold off to Wall Street.
Large investors buy and sell mortgage-backed bonds like stocks, meaning that any given home loan can change hands a half-dozen times or more.
However, an investment firm that later wants to foreclose on someone’s mortgage must provide a chain of paperwork proving that it really owns the loan in question. Failure to produce an original of even one key document can get a foreclosure case dismissed.
“It’s Real Estate 101,” Dibert said. “In order to foreclose on a mortgage, you have to prove that you own it.”
Dibert, who’s worked in the mortgage industry for the past decade, launched MFI in June after friends kept asking him to check their loans for rip-offs.
“People were coming up to me and saying, ‘Steve, I think I got taken on my mortgage. Can you take a look at the loan papers?’ ” the 41-year-old recalled. “As more and more people started calling, I realized that I could make a business out of this.”
These days, Dibert performs about 100 checks on each customer’s loan, producing five- to 15-page reports and charging about $350 to $600.
The Florida man estimates that he finds problems as much as 90 percent of the time.
Common flaws include math errors on federal Truth in Lending Act forms, which by law must accurately list a mortgage’s total lifetime cost within $35.
While such mistakes can seem minor, they often give homeowners just enough leverage to get out of fraudulent loans.
For instance, Dibert recently helped a man who thought he agreed to pay $1,500 a month, but ended up facing roughly $3,800 in monthly mortgage bills.
August Blass of California-based National Loan Auditors thinks the housing boom led to lots of flawed loans because “things were going 1,000 miles an hour, so (banking) fundamentals were lost.”
MFI was quoted in Mortgage Daily
November 23, 2008 by admin · Leave a Comment
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| Two organizations praised improvements to modification programs for conforming and government-insured loans. Two other firms are warning about the modification process and its players, while two service providers are offering products to help make the modification process easier for servicers.RediMod was launched by Lender Processing Services Inc., a press release Wednesday said. The new modular service automates mass modifications by automating loan eligibility and best-fit determinations without having to replace or upgrade core technology infrastructure.
“The solution includes data and analytics models that assign each loan in a portfolio a default propensity and loss severity score, as well as a highly configurable rules engine that identifies the borrowers who are delinquent or at risk of defaulting,” Lender Processing stated. “These loans then are run through a process that identifies the best possible workout option based upon factors, set by the servicer.” ServiceLink said today that it provides loan modification solutions for a range of modification types — including rate resets, payment recasts and complex loan-term adjustments. Streamlined modification services include title and closing, valuation and a guarantee that the modification instrument does not impair the existing lien. Billionaire Wilbur L. Ross issued a statement last week in support of the streamlined modification plan for conforming loans announced by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Ross owns American Home Mortgage Servicing Inc. — the former servicing operation of failed American Home Mortgage Investment Corp. American Home Mortgage Servicing, which serviced $85 billion as of Oct. 30, completed nearly 20,000 loan modifications from May through October out of 37,553 requested modifications, the statement said. The Irving, Texas-based company encouraged private investors, which own 90 percent of the loans it services, to support the streamlined modification plan on nonconforming loans. HOPE NOW issued a statement today praising improvements to the HOPE for Homeowners program announced yesterday by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Among the improvements was an increase in the maximum loan-to-value to 96.5 percent from 90.0 percent. Another enhancement was the ability to pay junior lienholders at the loan closing. “Hope for Homeowners will now be an even more valuable and useful tool,” HOPE NOW said. “It is a worthwhile [addition] to the loan modification efforts that HOPE NOW members are using.” An alert was issued by MFI-Miami LLC about criminally run loan modification companies. MFI, a mortgage auditing firm that also provides forensic mortgage fraud investigation services, said California and Florida are among the only states to regulate loan modification firms — though published reports indicate that Colorado now requires loan modification consultants to be licensed as mortgage brokers. Among 10 factors MFI said should be scrutinized for modification companies were whether they contract work out, have an attorney on staff or guarantee their work. Outreach Housing LLC released a statement last week calling on delinquent borrowers to be wary of loan modifications because borrowers are required to waive their rights. The company is prodding borrowers to let it help them find Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and Truth-in-Lending Act compliance errors — which it claims to have found on 60 percent of the documents it has analyzed. |
