NY Fed joins Investors demanding B of A buy back Mortgages

The Washington Post

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York has joined a group of investors demanding that Bank of America buy back billions of dollars worth of mortgage securities that are plagued with shoddy documentation and lending standards, according to people familiar with the matter.

Some of the most powerful investment groups in the country as well as the New York arm of the central bank are accusing one of Bank of America's major mortgage divisions of cutting corners when it was issuing mortgages during the housing boom and as it has been foreclosing on struggling borrowers during the bust.

If Bank of America refuses to comply, these investors could end up suing, a person familiar with the matter said.

The demand from the New York Fed and other investors sets up an unusual and high-stakes confrontation, pitting an arm of the federal government against the country's biggest bank. It also illustrates conflicting policy priorities, because it could put the Fed at odds with a bank the Treasury Department has been helping through the financial crisis over the past two years.

With this new confrontation, the government finds itself in the awkward position of being an unhappy private investor pressing for its rights to be enforced. The New York Fed holds roughly $16 billion of mortgage securities that it acquired after it bailed out American International Group.

On Tuesday, Bank of America dismissed concerns that investors will drag the bank into court for years with costly lawsuits.

"We don't see the issues that people [are] worried about, quite frankly," chief executive Brian Moynihan said in a conference call Tuesday as the bank reported a $7.3 billion third-quarter loss.

But against a backdrop of accusations that banks did not properly foreclosure on homes, a growing number of bondholders are ramping up attempts to recoup their losses from mortgage securities they bought from banks. These securities plummeted in value as home prices dropped and a massive wave of borrowers fell behind on their payments.

Attorneys for the group of investors say that affiliates of Countrywide Financial, which was bought by Bank of America in 2008, failed to service the loans as promised after the investors bought a large swath of a $47 billion offering of mortgage loans.

These investors, which also include Blackrock, Prudential, MetLife and Pimco, argue the banks have not kept accurate paperwork on the loans that were sold, a charge being investigated across the nation as details have emerged that banks may have taken shortcuts to save money and time. These concerns have prodded a handful of banks, including Bank of America, to temporarily halt foreclosure sales.

The big investment firms - which manage funds from endowments, pension funds and others - say they have also been upset that Treasury and the banks have been too quick to restructure mortgages, which hurts investors. Yet the department has left largely untouched consumer debt and home equity loans owed to the same big banks at the heart of the lending and foreclosure debacles, according to a senior executive at one of the investment companies.

Now that new document problems have emerged, one senior executive said, investors are able to allege that Countrywide didn't even own the mortgages it sold and was in violation of local real estate laws. As a result, he said, Bank of America is responsible for repurchasing the securities and paying the investors in full.

Investors' fear, he said, was that "the politicians creating noise about mom and apple pie and the servicing industry will agree to all sorts of things to do right by the borrower, and the person who pays the ultimate cost is the investor."

Headlines about flawed foreclosures have added momentum for the small group of investors who have been threatening legal action for years against the banks.

"We've signed up many new investors," said Tal Franklin, an attorney. "People have realized that we're here and just didn't know it before."

Blackrock, Pimco and the New York Fed declined to comment. MetLife and Prudential did not return calls for comment.

On Tuesday, Bank of America said its quarterly loss was driven mainly by a $10.4 billion write-down in the value of its card services business as a result of new federal limits on debit card fees.

The company said it ended the third quarter facing $12.9 billion of claims that it should repurchase mortgages that it misrepresented.

Courts are hashing out the complex legal questions surrounding the way judges review foreclosures. On Tuesday, an emergency measure approved by Maryland's highest court empowered judges to bring in outside experts to review questionable papers.

"Nothing in this rule mandates any particular action by the court," said Alan Wilner, chairman of the Maryland Standing Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure. "This flexibility is essential, because the context and circumstances may be different from case to case."

Bank Foreclosures Reach New Record

ABC 

 

The nation's foreclosure epidemic gathered steam in September, with banks taking over more than 100,000 properties for the first time. Overall, filings rose 3 percent, according to RealtyTrac, an online service that tracks foreclosure rates.

More than 930,437 properties were hit a foreclosure filing in the third quarter of the year -- that includes a default notice, repossession or scheduled notice. The filings are a 1 percent decrease from the same period in 2009. Homeowners experiencing foreclosure filings increased by 4 percent compared with the second quarter.

Foreclosures are expected to fall following the decision by several of the largest lenders to halt filings after it was discovered that paperwork for many loans is missing or incorrect.

"We expect to see a dip in those bank repossessions — and possibly earlier stages of the foreclosure process — in the fourth quarter as several major lenders have halted foreclosure sales in some states while they review irregularities in foreclosure-processing documentation that has been called into question in recent weeks," said RealtyTrac CEO James J. Saccacio.

The foreclosure crisis in the U.S. began in 2007, when the stock market collapsed and unemployment began climbing to the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Home prices collapsed in many states including California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona. Homeowners either couldn't pay or walked away from their mortgages, leaving the lenders with properties worth far less than the amount owed.

Now foreclosures have become a huge part of overall sales. For the month of September, foreclosed property made up 31 percent of home sales. The 24 states with the most foreclosure documentation problems account for 32 percent of all foreclosure property sales, according to RealtyTrac.

In the third quarter, one in every 139 housing units received a foreclosure filing. Nevada continued to reign as the state with the highest foreclosure rate with one in every 29 homes in some stage of going back to the lender. Next is Arizona, where one in every 55 homes have received a foreclosure filing. In No. 3 Florida, foreclosures affect one in every 56 homes.

For the first time ever bank repossession reached six figures with more than 102,134 homeowners losing their property in the month of September. The record numbers come after the Obama administration's Home Affordable Modification program sank to a 10-month low in August.

The program meant to save homes only assisted 33,000 homeowners. In 2009 President Obama vowed to help up to 4 million homeowners through the program, but only a little more than 10 percent or 449,000 homeowners have received assistance.

In the third quarter a few states like Vermont and North Dakota escaped the bleak housing news. The two ranked 48 and 49, respectively, for foreclosure filings. Homeowners in West Virginia were the safest of all 50 states with only one in every 2,383 receiving foreclosure filings.

Yesterday, the attorneys general of all 50 states announced an investigation into whether sloppiness or deceit led to the latest episode of the national foreclosure drama, further threatening the recovery of the U.S. housing market.

"This is not a silver bullet to keep millions of Americans in their homes," said Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, who's heading the bipartisan investigation. "This is a chance to right the law and get the process right, a chance to have some extra time ... and maybe a chance to do some modifications."

Statements from Miller and other state investigators said the initial focus will be on whether industry employees -- so-called "robo-signers" -- signed off on thousands of foreclosures every month without reviewing the files as legally required.

"Robo-signing is the one [problem] ... we're most concerned about," Miller told reporters late Wednesday, but he added, "We're not ruling out other issues."

The immediate goals of the investigation appear to be a halt of improper foreclosures and a review the past and present mortgage service practices, investigators said.

"We want this to never happen again," Miller said. "We will try to do this as quickly as possible." In courts throughout the nation, homeowner attorneys have alleged that lenders forged signatures and improperly notarized documents in the rush to foreclose on homeowners.

The joint investigation into the practices of the booming mortgage-servicing industry could pressure financial institutions to rewrite a sea of corrupt paperwork.

Previous calls for a nationwide foreclosure moratorium had industry insiders worried but the states stopped short of requesting such a measure.

"The worst thing anybody could do right now is impose a lengthy moratorium on foreclosures, particularly if it results in people not being able to sell properties that have already been foreclosed on," said Rick Sharga, vice president of the real estate data firm RealtyTrac. "Right now, foreclosure properties represent about 30 percent of all home sales, and to take 30 percent of sales out of the housing market at a time when it's already unstable could have pretty disastrous results."

The Obama administration Monday rejected calls for a nationwide moratorium on foreclosures amid growing concerns about the market's recovery.

A moratorium would help families on the verge of losing their homes, but Sharga and other industry experts said it would lead to a backlog of homes on the market and further depress prices.

Even with tight lending standards, the nation is on pace to sell 4 million properties by the end of the year. That's way down from the peak of the housing boom when over 6 million were sold annually, however.

"The housing market is trying to recover ... but right now these technical delays are causing additional uncertainly," said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. "Some potential buyers may not want to enter the market now. And that will hold back the recovery time."

In recent weeks, major lenders such as JPMorgan Chase, Ally Financial's GMAC Mortgage unit and Bank of America have conceded that paperwork supporting an unknown number of foreclosures contain errors ranging from wrong dates to forged or inconsistent signatures. In some instances, mortgage company employees signed foreclosure documents without first verifying the information in them.

In response, the banks have suspended tens of thousands of pending foreclosures. Bank of America, for example, has suspended all its foreclosures in 23 states.

Ally Suspends Evictions Over Allegations of Foreclosure Fraud

Washington Post

Some of the nation's largest mortgage companies used a single document processor who said he signed off on foreclosures without having read the paperwork - an admission that may open the door for homeowners across the country to challenge foreclosure proceedings.

The legal predicament compelled Ally Financial, the nation's fourth-largest home lender, to halt evictions of homeowners in 23 states this week. Now it appears hundreds of other companies, including mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, may also be affected because they use Ally to service their loans.

As head of Ally's foreclosure document processing team, 41-year-old Jeffrey Stephan was required to review cases to make sure the proceedings were legally justified and the information was accurate. He was also required to sign the documents in the presence of a notary.

In a sworn deposition, he testified that he did neither.

The reason may be the sheer volume of the documents he had to hand-sign: 10,000 a month. Stephan had been at that job for five years.

How the nation's foreclosure system became reliant on the tedious work of a few corporate bureaucrats is still a matter that mortgage lenders are trying to answer. While the lenders may have had legitimate cause to foreclose, the mishandling of the paperwork has given homeowners ammunition in their fight against foreclosure and has drawn the attention of state law enforcement officials.

Ally spokesman James Olecki called the problem with the documents "an important but technical defect." He said the papers were "factually accurate" but conceded that "corrective action" may have to be taken in some cases and that others may "require court intervention."

Olecki said the company services loans "from hundreds of different lenders," but he declined to provide names.

Spokesmen for Fannie and Freddie confirmed Tuesday after inquiries from The Washington Post that they use Ally, formerly called GMAC, to oversee some mortgages. The companies have launched internal reviews to assess the scope of any potential issues.

Ally, Fannie and Freddie - all troubled mortgage companies that received extraordinary bailouts by the federal government during the financial crisis - declined to say how many loans might be affected. The Treasury Department, which owns a majority stake in Ally and seized Fannie and Freddie in 2008, also declined to comment.

Fannie and Freddie, created by Congress to finance mortgages and encourage homeownership, have in recent years been repossessing houses at record numbers. Fannie alone reported recently that 450,000 of its single-family loans were seriously delinquent or in the foreclosure process as of June 30. That's nearly 5 percent of the loans it guarantees.

Lawyers defending homeowners have accused some of the nation's largest lenders of foreclosing on families without verifying all of the information in a case, but it has been hard for them to stop foreclosure proceedings.

Ally's moratorium comprises only the 23 states - none in the Washington area - that mandate a court judgment before a lender can take possession of a property. But if Stephan signed documents related to foreclosures in states without this requirement (it's unclear whether he did), it could help a much broader range of borrowers.

Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patrick Madigan, chair of a national foreclosure prevention group composed of state attorneys general and lenders, said the fallout from the Ally review could be enormous because Stephan's actions could be considered an unfair and deceptive practice.

"If servicers are submitting court documents that aren't true or that have not been verified, that is of great concern," Madigan said.

Stephan's job at Ally was arguably one of the least enviable in the mortgage business: formally signing off on foreclosure papers that his company would submit to the courts to get approval to evict delinquent homeowners and resell their homes.

From his office in suburban Philadelphia, Stephan oversaw a team of 13 employees that brought documents to him for his signature at a rapid clip. Stephan did not respond to messages left at his work and home.

His official title was team leader of the document execution unit of Ally's foreclosure department, but consumer advocates call him the company's "super robot signor" or "affidavit slave."

In sworn depositions taken in December and June for two separate court cases involving families trying to keep their homes, Stephan revealed his shortcuts when reviewing the files. He said he would glance at the borrower's names, the debt owed and a few other numbers but would not read through all the documents as legally required. He would then sign them. The files were packed up in bulk and sent off for notarization several days later.

Stephan testified he did not know how the "summary judgment" affidavits he signed were used in judicial foreclosure cases.

At the rate Stephan was reviewing files, if he worked an eight-hour day he would have had an average of only 1.5 minutes for each document.

"A ridiculous amount of time for something so critically important," said Thomas Cox, an attorney in Maine who was one of those who deposed Stephan. He added that Maine and Florida law enforcement officials are investigating the matter.

Stephan was the only employee signing papers for foreclosures that were to be submitted to courts that did not involve bankruptcies. The latter cases, which were more complex, were handled by a separate department.

Olecki said Stephan still works for Ally but added, "We cannot comment further about his position."

While several large lenders contacted by The Post declined to talk about the document review process for foreclosures, attorneys working on behalf of homeowners said the setup at Ally was not unusual.

Christopher Immel, an attorney in Florida who deposed Stephan for a case in Palm Beach County, said he thinks Stephan was not a rogue employee but one that was performing his job responsibilities as the company told him to do.

"GMAC has a business model to do this, and Stephan was just one small part of it," Immel said. "He was under the impression it was okay to do this."