Foreclosure Prevention

Norfolk homeowner narrowly averts foreclosure

September 6, 2010 By Steve Dibert Leave a Comment

By Josh Brown, The Virginian-Pilot

Hope was beginning to fade last week that Michele McBeth could save her Bayview home from foreclosure.

The Norfolk elementary school teacher had been working for weeks with a foreclosure-prevention counselor, and spent hours going through financial documents, filling out paperwork and pleading with her mortgage company to cancel the auction.

But Wells Fargo Home Mortgage offered no help, and the Aug. 27 sale date loomed.

McBeth, whose story was highlighted in an Aug. 16 article in The Virginian-Pilot, called her lender more than a year ago to try to find a way to bring down her monthly mortgage payment. The company placed her on the U.S. Treasury Department’s Making Home Affordable loan modification program.

But instead of helping her, the process brought McBeth, 42, to the brink of foreclosure.

In the days following the article, numerous individuals who read her story reached out to help.

“Their generosity was overwhelming,” she said. “I was so grateful.”

But McBeth wanted to exhaust all options with her lender. By last week, she and her counselor at The Up Center had hit a brick wall.

“They didn’t even offer anything,” said John Allen, who is in charge of the foreclosure-prevention services at The Up Center. “I found that to be very unusual, especially when a person has proven they have the means to make a legitimate payment arrangement.”

Read more here: http://hamptonroads.com.nyud.net/2010/09/norfolk-homeowner-narrowly-averts-foreclosure

Filed Under: Mortgage News Tagged With: economic meltdown, financial crisis, foreclosure crisis, foreclosure help, foreclosure mediation, Foreclosure Prevention, foreclosure rescue, foreclosures, Housing Crisis, illegal foreclosures, Loan Modifications, Mortgage Crisis, mortgage fraud, mortgage help, mortgages, Virginia foreclosure help, Wells Fargo

New Mass. law toughens foreclosure safeguards

August 8, 2010 By Steve Dibert 1 Comment

Steve Leblanc, AP/Boston Globe

Massachusetts homeowners facing foreclosure and tenants in foreclosed apartment buildings will get extra protections under a bill signed into law Saturday by Gov. Deval Patrick.

Patrick signed the law at a single family home in Brockton that was foreclosed on but then rehabilitated by a local affordable housing agency and placed on the market.

“Even as Massachusetts continues its economic recovery, thousands of families are still dealing with the effects of foreclosure and they need immediate assistance,” Patrick said in a press release. “Combined with the 2007 comprehensive foreclosure law, we are redoubling our efforts to address the foreclosure crisis.”

The new law bars bankers and lenders from issuing wholesale eviction notices to tenants in foreclosed buildings. Under the law, tenants can only be evicted for just cause, like not paying their rent on time or other violations of their lease.

For homeowners, the new law temporarily extends an existing 90-day cooling off period designed to give property owners and their lenders time to negotiate new terms to a mortgage to help avoid a foreclosure. The new law extends the period to 150 days.

The cooling off period can be reduced back to 90 days if the lender makes a good-faith effort to work out a reasonable alternative to foreclosure.

In an effort to protect older homeowners, the new law requires those who want to obtain a reverse mortgage on their home to meet with a counselor approved by the Executive Office of Elder Affairs. It also criminalizes residential mortgage fraud.

Read here: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/08/07/new_mass_law_toughens_foreclosure_safeguards/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

Filed Under: Massachusetts, Mortgage News Tagged With: avoiding foreclosure, economic meltdown, financial crisis, Financial Reform, foreclosure crisis, foreclosure defense, foreclosure help, foreclosure mediation, Foreclosure Prevention, foreclosures, Housing Crisis, illegal foreclosures, Loan Modifications, massachusetts foreclosures, Massachusetts mortgage delinquencies, massachusetts mortgage fraud, Mortgage Crisis, mortgage fraud, mortgages, New massachusetts foreclosure law

Mortgage fraud accusers promise hundreds more cases

July 27, 2010 By Steve Dibert 1 Comment

James Cook, Daily Tribune

Officials at an organization representing homeowners battling their mortgage lenders say hundreds more people in the tri-county area will join additional lawsuits.

Officials at Michigan Loan Compliance Advisory Group Inc. in Troy said they plan to file lawsuits including up to another 1,000 plaintiffs against financial institutions for deceptive lending, excessive fees and other wrongdoing in granting subprime mortgages.

That’s on top of the 88 plaintiffs representing 78 mortgages in Oakland and Macomb counties who through Michigan Loan Compliance sued more than two dozen banks for awarding inflated mortgages to borrowers.

“We’re not stopping,” said May Brikho, senior consultant at Michigan Loan Compliance.

“We’re trying to convince judges there is fraud, there is a scam. The banks are not the victims. They never lost anything.

“We are getting a lot of new plaintiffs who are out of a job and they do not qualify for loan modification. People are telling other people and they are contacting us.”

The pending cases in Oakland, Macomb and a third in Wayne County were filed in state circuit court, but have since been moved to U.S. District Court in Detroit.

However, Loan Compliance attorney Ziyad Kased has asked federal Judge Arthur Tarnow to return the Oakland case to Judge Colleen O’Brien in the Oakland court in Pontiac and said he believes federal Judge Nancy Edmunds on her own may return the Macomb case back to circuit Judge John Foster in Mount Clemens.

Kased said the Oakland case should remain in state court because all of the defendants and plaintiffs do not have different state residences, which is a requirement to get the case moved.

He said that Ocwen and Saxon must gain “concurrence” of the other defendants to warrant permanent transfer and that all of the defendants must be located outside the state.

Attorney Chantelle Neumann, representing Ocwen Loan Servicing LLC, named in the Macomb case, and Saxon Mortgage Co., named in the Oakland case, gained “removal” to federal court for the time being. Neumann said the defendants did not have to gain concurrence from other defendants because the plaintiffs improperly got together.

“Plaintiffs have aggregated their grievances into one mass action in an effort to evade federal jurisdiction,” said Neumann, a Rochester Hills-based lawyer also representing Saxon, in a legal brief.

Kased says the plaintiffs have similar claims.

Filed Under: Michigan, Mortgage News Tagged With: economic meltdown, financial crisis, foreclosure crisis, foreclosure help, foreclosure mediation, Foreclosure Prevention, foreclosure rescue, Housing Crisis, illegal foreclosures, mortgage fraud, mortgages

Use of Private Process Servers Is Up; Concern Is, Too

July 25, 2010 By Steve Dibert 2 Comments

DAN MIHALOPOULOS and PATRICK REHKAMP, NY Times

When Frank Knight fell behind on his house payments in 2008 and the mortgage lender began a foreclosure case, a process server said he handed Mr. Knight the court papers at his bungalow on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

But public records show that at the time the server said Mr. Knight was being served, Mr. Knight was at a job site on the West Side, more than seven miles from his brick home in the Jefferson Park neighborhood.

“He lied on his affidavit,” Mr. Knight said this week. “I just feel like they were trying to foreclose upon me and my family as fast as possible. Why? So the bank could get their hands on this property, so they could turn it around.”

The man responsible for hand-delivering the foreclosure papers to Mr. Knight’s home is a special process server, an employee of a private detective agency. In the summer of 2007, with the housing bubble bursting and the number of foreclosure cases soaring, a Cook County judge issued an order making it easier for mortgage-foreclosure lawyers to hire special process servers to do what otherwise would be carried out by Cook County sheriff’s deputies, according to records reviewed by the Chicago News Cooperative and the Better Government Association.

The process server in Mr. Knight’s case was Timothy McWard, who said he did not recall the case. But Mr. McWard said he has served more than 20,000 legal documents in the past five years and the papers are “always given to somebody,” he said. “They will say whatever they can to save their house.”

A lawsuit filed last week in federal court in Chicago is challenging the practice, saying it is a violation of state and federal law for the judge to allow freer use of special process servers. The lawyer for David L. Washington, the foreclosed property owner who is the plaintiff in the suit, said he hoped to convert the case into a class-action suit that would void tens of thousands of foreclosure cases handled by special process servers in recent years.

Filed Under: Mortgage News Tagged With: Chicago foreclosures, economic meltdown, financial crisis, foreclosure, foreclosure crisis, foreclosure defense, Foreclosure Prevention, foreclosures, Housing Crisis, illegal foreclosures, mortgages, process servicers

Norfolk homeowner narrowly averts foreclosure

New Mass. law toughens foreclosure safeguards

Mortgage fraud accusers promise hundreds more cases

Use of Private Process Servers Is Up; Concern Is, Too

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