     don harris (Saxman) | Sunday, July 02, 2000 - 11:43 am 
I am suing a secondary mortgage market company--a company that buys first mortgages that were entered into "down the street" but are sold and serviced from out of state. It appears that these places have no incentive whatever to treat consumers well--no good will to protect because consumers never choose to do business with them.
The actual damages may or may not be that high, but this particular company's arrogance and lack of concern for doing the right thing should make a court or jury mad. However, I need studies that must have been (should have been?)done regarding the secondary mortgage market and consumers' general unhappiness with their new, out of state, lenders who are rude and unavailable to them.
Does anyone have any possible sources of information for me--studies, articles lawsuits, congressional investigations, etc.
Thanks
Don |
| Christine Baker (Admin) | Sunday, July 02, 2000 - 12:00 pm
I can't point you to any studies, I *THINK* there were some investigations or even new regs in the 90's.
What is your specific problem? |
| Michael Bardelli (Bull22) | Saturday, July 08, 2000 - 05:16 pm
I had a simialr situation to yours. I had decided after much research on lenders in the Virginia Beach area to use First Union bank as they had the best rates on VA mortgage loans.(6.5% fixed for 30 years). I closed on my condo and made the first three payments. I then received a letter in the mail informing me that Homeside Lending, a firm based in Illinois, was buying my mortgage from first union. This infuriated me because although the terms of the loan wouldn't change, I wanted to do business with First Union, not Homeside lending. Well, to add insult to injury, when Homeside lending bought my loan, it took two months for the service package to completely go from First Union to Homeside. The result- it looked like I had not make a payment on my mortgage for two months! Not only did I make payments for that time, I also paid additional principal payments as well! If I had not noticed that my checks for my mortgage payments had not cleared my bank, Homeside was going to mark me with two 30 day late payments and start foreclosure! All this because big business screwed up. To resolve the situation took many long hours on a phone with Homeside trying to get them to realize their own errors and not mark my account late. Luckily that worked and the package came thorough and my account was brought up to date. It all comes down to this, secondary mortgage companies suck and shouldn't be allowed to do business like they do. I hope you succeed in your suit and make those little bastards pay. Best of luck.
Mike |
| Christine Baker (Admin) | Saturday, July 08, 2000 - 10:53 pm
Several years ago the loan docs started to require ONE MORE signature on one more disclosure, the document authorizing the sale of the loan servicing.
Most of the time it's not the loans being sold, just the servicing, i.e. billing and collecting payments for FNMA or some other investor. It's an extremely profitable business!
I *think* the servicer gets to keep all the late charges, i.e. one automated late notice often pays over $100. There's definitely an incentive for the servicer to "lose" checks.
Servicing rights are sold for a percentage of the loan amount, and the lower the expenses of the servicer, the higher the profits.
You'll never find out about the servicing transfer until signing, those "little details" aren't mentioned in the ads.
If you do read everything at closing, you'll sit there for HOURS reading. I always tried to get a copy of the loan docs for review before signing.
But there's no point to refuse signing all these disclosures, the only thing I've ever gotten changed were borrower's name/address etc.
Refusal to sign will result in NO LOAN.
I'm still blank on whether there was any legislation, but I DO remember that there were lots of problems with mortgage loan servicing resulting in media attention and possible legislation. There might have been legislation requiring an 800 number, but I'm not sure about that.
Servicers also had (have?) a tendency to NOT apply escrow payments properly, resulting in legislation on that. |
