Knowing when a property is actually real estate owned, and when it is merely a foreclosure is paramount to finding the best deals on property. Prior to the bank buying the property, the buyer will default on their mortgage and the property will be placed on sale to the public via auction. This property is now a foreclosed property and will be sold at a discounted price to the public.
If the home does not sell for the price that the bank wants, the lender will then buy back the property in order to avoid selling it for less than the market value. At this point, the property becomes REO property and can offer significant savings to you as a buyer.
Banks are not in the business of owning property, they are in the business of making money. Once a property becomes REO property, the bank will begin the process of listing the property for sale. A typical real estate owned home can sell for almost 20% off market value.
Because the lender wants to get rid of the property as soon as possible, they are far more willing to work with potential buyers. Generally, any taxes or debts due will be mended by the lender and they will also evict any current tenants to make the buying process easier for buyers.
First time buyers are ideal candidates for REO property purchases. They are able to obtain their first home at a significant savings and with none of the difficulties typical of traditional real estate transactions.
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Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
Showing posts with label foreclosure help. Show all posts
Showing posts with label foreclosure help. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
Friday, January 14, 2011
Federal Mortgage Rule Unpopular with Homeowners
Foreclosures in MA are part of the overall foreclosure crisis in America. Consumers at present have 3 years to argue their case to lenders when there is fraud or deceit involved. The homeowner is still required to pay their mortgage however, even if less than judicious circumstances exist in its processing.
The following article touches on the subject of Foreclosures and homeowners in general.
Consumers, Senators Criticize Fed’s Proposed Mortgage Rule
by Credit.com on 01/06/2011
Under a new proposal from the Federal Reserve Board, which would amend the consumer protection laws passed over the summer, consumers would have to pay off a home loan even after they received bad information, before it could be terminated, according to a report from Dow Jones Newswires. Currently, Americans have three years to argue that lenders broke consumer protection laws, and perhaps force lenders to refinance or modify the loan.
“In this time of record foreclosures and reports of systemic problems with the operations of the largest mortgage servicers, the proposed revisions are unfortunate and unnecessary,” a group of Democratic U.S. Senators wrote to the Fed, according to the report. “The mortgage market needs greater oversight and accountability to restore borrower confidence lost in the mortgage crisis. The proposed rules would undermine this goal.”
The letter was signed by Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and former Senator Chris Dodd, who used to head the Senate Banking Committee, the report said. A Fed spokeswoman told the news organization that the lawmakers’ suggestion will be taken under advisement.
Many consumers have been victimized by improperly handled mortgages over the last few years, and many have faced foreclosure as a result.
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
The following article touches on the subject of Foreclosures and homeowners in general.
Consumers, Senators Criticize Fed’s Proposed Mortgage Rule
by Credit.com on 01/06/2011
Under a new proposal from the Federal Reserve Board, which would amend the consumer protection laws passed over the summer, consumers would have to pay off a home loan even after they received bad information, before it could be terminated, according to a report from Dow Jones Newswires. Currently, Americans have three years to argue that lenders broke consumer protection laws, and perhaps force lenders to refinance or modify the loan.
“In this time of record foreclosures and reports of systemic problems with the operations of the largest mortgage servicers, the proposed revisions are unfortunate and unnecessary,” a group of Democratic U.S. Senators wrote to the Fed, according to the report. “The mortgage market needs greater oversight and accountability to restore borrower confidence lost in the mortgage crisis. The proposed rules would undermine this goal.”
The letter was signed by Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and former Senator Chris Dodd, who used to head the Senate Banking Committee, the report said. A Fed spokeswoman told the news organization that the lawmakers’ suggestion will be taken under advisement.
Many consumers have been victimized by improperly handled mortgages over the last few years, and many have faced foreclosure as a result.
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
MA Real Estate Attorneys and Qualifying Mortgages
MA Mortgage Loan and Refinancing Attorneys can help you avoid difficulties in your refinancing or first time homeowner mortgage applications.
Having one on one assistance to ensure that your closing and financial documents are in order and that your mortgage payments will be in a range that is affordable for you will help eliminate any future concerns about foreclosure or inability to make your mortgage payments on time.
The following article describes a situation involving mortgage finance companies and the housing crisis where inexperienced employees were hired to process foreclosure paperwork and mortgage information, ultimately to the detriment of the mortgage holders involved.
Bankers Ignored Signs of Trouble on Foreclosures
By ERIC DASH and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
October 13, 2010
At JPMorgan Chase & Company, they were derided as “Burger King kids” — walk-in hires who were so inexperienced they barely knew what a mortgage was.
At Citigroup and GMAC, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on home foreclosures was outsourced to frazzled workers who sometimes tossed the paperwork into the garbage.
And at Litton Loan Servicing, an arm of Goldman Sachs, employees processed foreclosure documents so quickly that they barely had time to see what they were signing.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of the loan,” a Litton employee said in a deposition last year. “I’m not a loan officer.”
As the furor grows over lenders’ efforts to sidestep legal rules in their zeal to reclaim homes from delinquent borrowers, these and other banks insist that they have been overwhelmed by the housing collapse.
But interviews with bank employees, executives and federal regulators suggest that this mess was years in the making and came as little surprise to industry insiders and government officials. The issue gained new urgency on Wednesday, when all 50 state attorneys general announced that they would investigate foreclosure practices. That news came on the same day that JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it had not used the nation’s largest electronic mortgage tracking system, MERS, in foreclosures, since 2008.
That system has been faulted for losing documents and other sloppy practices.
The root of today’s problems goes back to the boom years, when home prices were soaring and banks pursued profit while paying less attention to the business of mortgage servicing, or collecting and processing monthly payments from homeowners.
Banks spent billions of dollars in the good times to build vast mortgage machines that made new loans, bundled them into securities and sold those investments worldwide. Lowly servicing became an afterthought. Even after the housing bubble began to burst, many of these operations languished with inadequate staffing and outmoded technology, despite warnings from regulators.
When borrowers began to default in droves, banks found themselves in a never-ending game of catch-up, unable to devote enough manpower to modify, or ease the terms of, loans to millions of customers on the verge of losing their homes. Now banks are ill-equipped to deal the foreclosure process.
“We waited and waited and waited for wide-scale loan modifications,” said Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the first government officials to call on the industry to take action. “They never owned up to all the problems leading to the mortgage crisis. They have always downplayed it.”
In recent weeks, revelations that mortgage servicers failed to accurately document the seizure and sale of tens of thousands of homes have caused a public uproar and prompted lenders like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage to halt foreclosures in many states.
Even before the political outcry, many of the banks shifted employees into their mortgage servicing units and beefed up hiring. Wells Fargo, for instance, has nearly doubled the number of workers in its mortgage modification unit over the last year, to about 17,000, while Citigroup added some 2,000 employees since 2007, bringing the total to 5,000.
“We believe we responded appropriately to staff up to meet the increased volume,” said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Citigroup.
Some industry executives add that they’re committed to helping homeowners but concede they were slow to ramp up. “In hindsight, we were all slow to jump on the issue,” said Michael J. Heid, co-president of at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. “When you think about what it costs to add 10,000 people, that is a substantial investment in time and money along with the computers, training and system changes involved.”
Other officials say as foreclosures were beginning to spike as early as 2007, no one could have imagined how rapidly they would reach their current level. About 11.5 percent of borrowers are in default today, up from 5.7 percent from two years earlier.
“The systems were not ever that great to begin with, but you didn’t have that much strain on them,” said Jim Miller, who previously oversaw the mortgage servicing units for troubled borrowers at Citigroup, Chase and Capitol One. “I don’t think anybody anticipated this thing getting as bad as it did.”
Almost overnight, what had been a factorylike business that relied on workers with high school educations to process monthly payments needed to come up with a custom-made operation that could solve the problems of individual homeowners. Gregory Hebner, the president of the MOS Group, a California loan modification company that works closely with service companies, likened it to transforming McDonald’s into a gourmet eatery. “You are already in chase mode, and you never catch up,” he said.
To make matters worse, the banks had few financial incentives to invest in their servicing operations, several former executives said. A mortgage generates an annual fee equal to only about 0.25 percent of the loan’s total value, or about $500 a year on a typical $200,000 mortgage. That revenue evaporates once a loan becomes delinquent, while the cost of a foreclosure can easily reach $2,500 and devour the meager profits generated from handling healthy loans.
“Investment in people, training, and technology — all that costs them a lot of money, and they have no incentive to staff up,” said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual’s large mortgage servicing unit from 2004 to 2006.
And even when banks did begin hiring to deal with the avalanche of defaults, they often turned to workers with minimal qualifications or work experience, employees a former JPMorgan executive characterized as the “Burger King kids.” In many cases, the banks outsourced their foreclosure operations to law firms like that of David J. Stern, of Florida, which served clients like Citigroup, GMAC and others. Mr. Stern hired outsourcing firms in Guam and the Philippines to help.
The result was chaos, said Tammie Lou Kapusta, a former employee of Mr. Stern’s who was deposed by the Florida attorney general’s office last month. “The girls would come out on the floor not knowing what they were doing,” she said. “Mortgages would get placed in different files. They would get thrown out. There was just no real organization when it came to the original documents.”
Citigroup and GMAC say they are no longer giving any new work to Mr. Stern’s firm.
In some cases, even steps that were supposed to ease the situation, like the federal program aimed at helping homeowners modify their mortgages to reduce what they owed, had actually contributed to the mess. Loan servicing companies complain that bureaucratic requirements are constantly changed by Washington, forcing them to overhaul an already byzantine process that involves nearly 250 steps.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 14, 2010
A photo caption with an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to documents related to foreclosures. They are depositions from robosigners, not lawsuits.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 14, 2010
A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to one bank that had halted foreclosures. They were halted by GMAC Mortgage, which is owned by Ally Financial, not by the online retail operation, Ally Bank.
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
Having one on one assistance to ensure that your closing and financial documents are in order and that your mortgage payments will be in a range that is affordable for you will help eliminate any future concerns about foreclosure or inability to make your mortgage payments on time.
The following article describes a situation involving mortgage finance companies and the housing crisis where inexperienced employees were hired to process foreclosure paperwork and mortgage information, ultimately to the detriment of the mortgage holders involved.
Bankers Ignored Signs of Trouble on Foreclosures
By ERIC DASH and NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
October 13, 2010
At JPMorgan Chase & Company, they were derided as “Burger King kids” — walk-in hires who were so inexperienced they barely knew what a mortgage was.
At Citigroup and GMAC, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on home foreclosures was outsourced to frazzled workers who sometimes tossed the paperwork into the garbage.
And at Litton Loan Servicing, an arm of Goldman Sachs, employees processed foreclosure documents so quickly that they barely had time to see what they were signing.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of the loan,” a Litton employee said in a deposition last year. “I’m not a loan officer.”
As the furor grows over lenders’ efforts to sidestep legal rules in their zeal to reclaim homes from delinquent borrowers, these and other banks insist that they have been overwhelmed by the housing collapse.
But interviews with bank employees, executives and federal regulators suggest that this mess was years in the making and came as little surprise to industry insiders and government officials. The issue gained new urgency on Wednesday, when all 50 state attorneys general announced that they would investigate foreclosure practices. That news came on the same day that JPMorgan Chase acknowledged that it had not used the nation’s largest electronic mortgage tracking system, MERS, in foreclosures, since 2008.
That system has been faulted for losing documents and other sloppy practices.
The root of today’s problems goes back to the boom years, when home prices were soaring and banks pursued profit while paying less attention to the business of mortgage servicing, or collecting and processing monthly payments from homeowners.
Banks spent billions of dollars in the good times to build vast mortgage machines that made new loans, bundled them into securities and sold those investments worldwide. Lowly servicing became an afterthought. Even after the housing bubble began to burst, many of these operations languished with inadequate staffing and outmoded technology, despite warnings from regulators.
When borrowers began to default in droves, banks found themselves in a never-ending game of catch-up, unable to devote enough manpower to modify, or ease the terms of, loans to millions of customers on the verge of losing their homes. Now banks are ill-equipped to deal the foreclosure process.
“We waited and waited and waited for wide-scale loan modifications,” said Sheila C. Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, one of the first government officials to call on the industry to take action. “They never owned up to all the problems leading to the mortgage crisis. They have always downplayed it.”
In recent weeks, revelations that mortgage servicers failed to accurately document the seizure and sale of tens of thousands of homes have caused a public uproar and prompted lenders like Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and GMAC Mortgage to halt foreclosures in many states.
Even before the political outcry, many of the banks shifted employees into their mortgage servicing units and beefed up hiring. Wells Fargo, for instance, has nearly doubled the number of workers in its mortgage modification unit over the last year, to about 17,000, while Citigroup added some 2,000 employees since 2007, bringing the total to 5,000.
“We believe we responded appropriately to staff up to meet the increased volume,” said Mark Rodgers, a spokesman for Citigroup.
Some industry executives add that they’re committed to helping homeowners but concede they were slow to ramp up. “In hindsight, we were all slow to jump on the issue,” said Michael J. Heid, co-president of at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. “When you think about what it costs to add 10,000 people, that is a substantial investment in time and money along with the computers, training and system changes involved.”
Other officials say as foreclosures were beginning to spike as early as 2007, no one could have imagined how rapidly they would reach their current level. About 11.5 percent of borrowers are in default today, up from 5.7 percent from two years earlier.
“The systems were not ever that great to begin with, but you didn’t have that much strain on them,” said Jim Miller, who previously oversaw the mortgage servicing units for troubled borrowers at Citigroup, Chase and Capitol One. “I don’t think anybody anticipated this thing getting as bad as it did.”
Almost overnight, what had been a factorylike business that relied on workers with high school educations to process monthly payments needed to come up with a custom-made operation that could solve the problems of individual homeowners. Gregory Hebner, the president of the MOS Group, a California loan modification company that works closely with service companies, likened it to transforming McDonald’s into a gourmet eatery. “You are already in chase mode, and you never catch up,” he said.
To make matters worse, the banks had few financial incentives to invest in their servicing operations, several former executives said. A mortgage generates an annual fee equal to only about 0.25 percent of the loan’s total value, or about $500 a year on a typical $200,000 mortgage. That revenue evaporates once a loan becomes delinquent, while the cost of a foreclosure can easily reach $2,500 and devour the meager profits generated from handling healthy loans.
“Investment in people, training, and technology — all that costs them a lot of money, and they have no incentive to staff up,” said Taj Bindra, who oversaw Washington Mutual’s large mortgage servicing unit from 2004 to 2006.
And even when banks did begin hiring to deal with the avalanche of defaults, they often turned to workers with minimal qualifications or work experience, employees a former JPMorgan executive characterized as the “Burger King kids.” In many cases, the banks outsourced their foreclosure operations to law firms like that of David J. Stern, of Florida, which served clients like Citigroup, GMAC and others. Mr. Stern hired outsourcing firms in Guam and the Philippines to help.
The result was chaos, said Tammie Lou Kapusta, a former employee of Mr. Stern’s who was deposed by the Florida attorney general’s office last month. “The girls would come out on the floor not knowing what they were doing,” she said. “Mortgages would get placed in different files. They would get thrown out. There was just no real organization when it came to the original documents.”
Citigroup and GMAC say they are no longer giving any new work to Mr. Stern’s firm.
In some cases, even steps that were supposed to ease the situation, like the federal program aimed at helping homeowners modify their mortgages to reduce what they owed, had actually contributed to the mess. Loan servicing companies complain that bureaucratic requirements are constantly changed by Washington, forcing them to overhaul an already byzantine process that involves nearly 250 steps.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 14, 2010
A photo caption with an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to documents related to foreclosures. They are depositions from robosigners, not lawsuits.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 14, 2010
A previous version of this article referred incorrectly to one bank that had halted foreclosures. They were halted by GMAC Mortgage, which is owned by Ally Financial, not by the online retail operation, Ally Bank.
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
Friday, June 25, 2010
RI Attorney General Addresses Housing Issues
On May 15, 2010, Rhode Island's campaigning candidate for governor, Attorney General Patrick C. Lynch announced a plan to instill borrower-protection on all home sales in Rhode Island. The plan would include requirements for foreclosure counseling for borrowers, notice to homeowners and tenants of pending foreclosures, and provisions for allowing people who lose their homes to foreclosure, to rent from the lender.
The plan would further incorporate ideas being used in other states involving free legal representation and requiring brokers to recommend mortgages, a comprehensive listing of all foreclosed homes in the state, and refinancing based upon the best interest of the borrowers.
The addition of more use of the federal Housing and Urban Development programs and giving permission to the state's land bank to rehabilitate and purchase foreclosed properties in both suburban and rural communities, would not alleviate the already 130 properties currently in the state's land bank for which there are no funds for rehabilitation purposes.
The full article follows below:
http://www.projo.com/news/content/LYNCH_FORECLOSURE_PLAN_05-15-10_PUIFGBE_v64.3a9b3dc.html
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
The plan would further incorporate ideas being used in other states involving free legal representation and requiring brokers to recommend mortgages, a comprehensive listing of all foreclosed homes in the state, and refinancing based upon the best interest of the borrowers.
The addition of more use of the federal Housing and Urban Development programs and giving permission to the state's land bank to rehabilitate and purchase foreclosed properties in both suburban and rural communities, would not alleviate the already 130 properties currently in the state's land bank for which there are no funds for rehabilitation purposes.
The full article follows below:
http://www.projo.com/news/content/LYNCH_FORECLOSURE_PLAN_05-15-10_PUIFGBE_v64.3a9b3dc.html
------------------------------------------
Crowley & Cummings are real estate attorneys located in Dedham MA specializing in real estate closings, title examinations, complex title issues, purchase & sale agreements, condo conversions, and other related services. They service lenders and mortgage brokers, real estate agents, as well as buyers and sellers in Massachusetts, New England, and throughout the US. To learn more visit them online at www.CrowleyCummings.com.
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