November 2010

Image via Wikipedia There’s an assumption that the 6% typically paid in realtor commissions on a home sale is worth it because the seller will command a higher price than if he’d gone the “for sale by owner” route. But [...]

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Home loan modifications are a way for homeowners to avoid foreclosure, but it can take months or years to get through the process.

In mid-October, this issue sent Bank of America’s stock price into a dive. The markets were spooked by a letter sent by a Texas law firm on behalf of major investors. The story got a lot of coverage, but it’s [...]

The Federal Home Loan Bank of Indianapolis has filed a lawsuit claiming Bank of America, Countrywide, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and 33 other banks sold the agency fraudulent mortgage-backed securities.

Tenants Together, California’s statewide organization for renters’ rights, released a report yesterday surveying bank policies toward tenants after foreclosure. The report, entitled Without Justification: Banks Continue Mass Displacement of Innocent Tenants after Foreclosure analyzes rental policies and actions of the [...]

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) on Thursday called for bipartisan support for legislation that will make sure another foreclosure “mess” does not happen again, but said that homeowners who are delinquent should not have “false hopes” that a substantial number will [...]

These are desperate times for families facing foreclosure. Some companies are now preying on that desperation, claiming they can renegotiate delinquent mortgages in order to lower monthly payments. Some firms charge homeowners thousands of dollars to do it. But after [...]

PHOENIX – Mortgage finance giant Fannie Mae has opened a mortgage help center to help struggling homeowners with loans owned by the company. Arizona had the nation’s third-highest rate of foreclosures in August, which breaks down to 1 in every [...]

SAYREVILLE, N.J. — The housing bust left homeowners scrambling to hold onto their homes and for many of them, their hope is to be able to lower their payments.

Bankers, housing regulators and members of Congress agreed on this much in the week’s second congressional hearing on foreclosure problems: The system needs fixing. Some bank officials Thursday told a House subcommittee that their efforts to help borrowers in default [...]

Essentially, there’s a three monkeys act going on here: the servicers will hear no evil, the trustees will see no evil, and Treasury will speak no evil. And so long as they all remain deaf, dumb, and mute, they can [...]

Last year, Noel Sandoval, an accountant in San Mateo, Calif., who is disabled from epilepsy, asked Bank of America to ease the terms of his $369,000 mortgage under a federal program designed to help homeowners in distress. After almost 12 [...]

Esther “Moya” Smith fears it won’t be long before the bank changes the locks and boots her from the redbrick rowhouse in Olney where her mother moved the brood 15 years ago. But she won’t go. She can’t go, she [...]

The joint investigation by all 50 state attorneys general into mortgage servicing will go beyond alleged incidents of robo-signing, Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller told the Senate Banking Committee Tuesday. The investigation, announced in October, involves state bank and mortgage [...]

Media coverage on foreclosure scams, fraud, and shoddy judicial pleadings has tremendously heightened public awareness about dark sides of home foreclosures. News stories and information have even slightly changed public opinion about foreclosure happening only to borrowers who stupidly got [...]