Michael Olenick: How Banks and Their Lawyers Win at the Expense of Investors and Homeowners
By Michael Olenick, creator of FindtheFraud, a crowd sourced foreclosure document review system (still in alpha). You can follow him on Twitter at @michael_olenick or read his blog, Seeing Through Data
The focus of news stories on mortgage abuses often focus on the immediate victims, the borrowers, but that’s far from a complete tally of the losers. And they also typically fail to look hard enough at the winners and the way they are able, again and again, to burn everyone but themselves.
Our latest case study is a modest, non-descript one-story house in Seminole, Florida. Its owners, Suzanne and Luis Guerrero, did not set out to take a two-way trip through hell to win a free house as their prize for being tortured, but that is how their foreclosure case turned out. And as a result of bad conduct by local and the big ticket national law firm brought in to fight the Guerreros, the investors in Ace Securities Home Equity Loan Trust 2007-HE4 — even though they don’t know it, at least until now — get to pay the greatly magnified bill. Ocwen Loan Servicing, the most culpable party in this fiasco, also managed to emerge unscathed.
On Dec.7, 2006, at the height of the bubble, the Guerrero’s took out two loans for the same property, a first loan for $232,936 and a second loan for $58,234. Both loans were funded by Resmae Mortgage Corporation then later both the first and second lien were securitized into ACE 2007-HE4.
Be sure to check out the rest here…
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Maybe the State Bar association will start sweeping the streets between the foreclosed houses.