<p>According to my H, the financial guy, the big banks either let go or did not hire people to do things like work-outs and mortgage restructurings and so forth during the housing boom, because after all, house values were going to go up forever, so why bother? Writing enormous numbers of new loans was all that mattered. So now that they have foreclosures in the thousands and tens of thousands to deal with, they have a huge shortage of people on staff who actually know how to deal with them. Which leads to problems such as improperly processing foreclosure documents.</p>
<p>How people who had never had a mortgage got on their list is indeed puzzling, though.</p>
<p>We have 2 home equity LOCs instead of a conventional mortgage. We have engaged in a deal with a neighbor in which we traded a right of way on one side of our property for a piece of land on another side. This actually results in increasing the size of our property and hypothetically increasing its value. I cannot begin to tell you the difficulty our neighbor’s lawyer has had in getting them to process the paperwork. (Or even to extract an address to which to send it!) Most recently, BOA responded to his mailing with a request for about 6 things, most of which were documents that were already included in the mailing to which they were responding. THEY SIMPLY DID NOT READ IT. When H has attempted to discuss it with them, they persist in referring to it as a “land swap,” despite the fact that we retain title to the right of way. It’s mind-boggling, and very similar to the experience of trying to solve a computer problem with a person in India who a) cannot deviate from a script, even when the script is non-responsive to your actual issue, and b) cannot seem to comprehend what your are saying if it isn’t on their script.</p>
<p>Amazing. Now, what does anyone want to bet that BOA didn’t proceed to hire and train the numbers of personnel necessary to process and accurately dispense with this newly acquired paperwork back load? Doing that, after all, would eat into profits, wouldn’t it?</p>
<p>Instead, banks (and Bank of America is not the only one, by any means) outsourced this function to another organization, which then went on to efficiently robo-sign everything. What a mess!</p>
<p>How this family got a foreclosure proceeding instituted against it in the first place is puzzling. But mistakes do happen. What frosts me is that once B of A figured out that a mistake occurred, they didn’t take care of it in an expeditious manner.</p>
<p>The US real estate market is not going to be able to move forward until all the foreclosures and all of the people who aren’t paying on their loans are resolved. This process has taken too long already. </p>
<p>Seriously, I know people who haven’t paid a mortgage payment for 2 years and are still living in their house. There have to be more foreclosures and more loan revisions.</p>
<p>Years ago, I foreclosed on a couple who hadn’t paid their mortgage in 9 years and 9 months! They were both medical professionals; filed bankruptcy 3 times.</p>
<p>Perhaps BoA held a mortgage on the property from the previous owner, which was paid off when the property was sold, but the payoff was never recorded.</p>
<p>I publish a weekly newspaper that prints foreclosure and sale notices. For the 2 years up through last December, there was a flood of notices. Then come the beginning of this year, it pretty much dried up. The law firms we deal with say it’s because of the robo-signing mess. Most of the big lenders have pretty much worked through those problems (the law firms say), and the flood should resume some time this summer.</p>
<p>I don’t think that you could get a clean title that the title company would insure if the old mortgage payoff wasn’t recorded. Perhaps it wasn’t updated properly on B of A records…</p>
<p>Our experience with BofA mortgage department, even prior to the housing boom and their acquisition of Countrywide, was less than stellar. We were promised a very nice rate for refi, paid a required deposit, but then the bank sent an appraiser who intentionally lowballed the appraisal (by using much smaller, much older houses as comps!), so it looked like the house was worth much less than we paid for (and this was in 2001!!!). BofA wanted us to take on a mortgage insurance or two mortgages. How nice of them. H fought with them to get our deposit back, and eventually succeeded. Had H kept his BAC short until now, we would have been rich! :)</p>
<p>Bank of America ALWAYS passes the buck. I find it amusing that they claim the original request for payment went to an attorney who is no longer in business. WELL if they KNEW it went to the wrong attorney…then they clearly KNEW It had been filed.</p>
<p>I sent them a Power of Attorney…and they had the GALL to tell me that I sent it to the “wrong PO Box”. I told them…“well…if you KNOW it was sent to the ‘wrong’ PO box…then clearly you HAD it. Where is it now.” </p>
<p>Glad this couple got their money…and some satisfaction!!</p>