Loan Servicer Tactics… Foreclose don’t modify; lie, deceive, whatever it takes

• Tweet
• Email

• Tweet
• Email

As a citizen, please start asking tougher questions and demanding truthful answers of your elected officials. We MUST hold these men and women accountable to representing ‘we the people’ instead of their lobby pals.

Whatever you hear from the Administration or any of the large institutions via the drive-by media you can assume that it’s a lie or many shades of gray with dash or two of spin. Why? Well, of course, the truth is not going to get votes for politicians or more investors and account holders for any of these characters who operate in the shadows of financial institution corporate offices across America.

Let me give you a dose of truth serum in case you’re tempted to believe the drive by media reports on the foreclosures and the Making Home Affordable plan we’ve been told is going to rescue our economy and the housing market and the millions of families jobless and now facing foreclosure. You ready?

Here it is: the loan servicers don’t care about anything but money and the modus operandi is clear… foreclose as fast as possible on everyone in a mortgage hardship. Just modify enough loans to make everyone think we’re really on board with this. Make excuses for everything else. Lie to media about what’s really going on because mostly everyone believes what they hear anyway.

A deeper look into the numbers and statistics will leave you scratching your head though – and asking yourself the question, “but why?”

According to an article by Gretchen Morgenson from the New York Times, “Alan M. White, an assistant professor at the Valparaiso University law school in Indiana, analyzed data on 3.5 million subprime and alt-A mortgages in securitization pools overseen by Wells Fargo. The loans were written in 2005 through 2007; data on their performance is provided to the trusts’ investors. Mortgages handled by five of the nation’s largest loan servicing companies — Bank of America, Chase Home Finance and Litton Loan Servicing among them — are contained in the Wells Fargo data.

Mr. White found that mortgage modifications peaked in February and have declined in all but one month since. While servicers modified 23,749 loans in these trusts in February, they changed only 19,041 in May and 18,179 in June. This is exactly when servicers were supposed to be responding to the government’s loan modification urgings.

Foreclosures, meanwhile, keep rising. In June, 281,560 were in process, slightly above the 277,847 in May. Last January, there were about 242,000 foreclosures in the pipeline among the Wells Fargo trusts.”

Well, isn’t that interesting. You see, the numbers simply don’t lie. They tell the truth and expose the raw data of what is really happening. The report continues, “the most fascinating, and frightening, figures in the data detail how much money is lost when foreclosed homes are sold. In June, the data show almost 32,000 liquidation sales; the average loss on those was 64.7 percent of the original loan balance.”

Did you catch that? The AVERAGE loss on a house that a servicers takes to foreclosure sale is a whopping 64.7% of the original loan balance!!!! The average loan amount was $223,000. But in the liquidation sale, the property sold for $144,000 less, or a $79,000 sales price on average.

So any logical person goes, “why? Why would a servicer foreclose on the home instead of providing a loan modification for a homeowner who wants to pay but just needs a reduction in that payment?” I know I can’t be the only one who’s wondered that…

If you want to find the answer you just gotta follow the money… it’s that simple. And the answer does not shed any more favorable light on these servicers – who, by the way, are just subsidiaries of the main financial institutions. Example: Citimortgage is the servicer. They are owned by Citigroup. America’s Servicing Company is the servicer. They are owned by Wells Fargo.

So back to following the money. First, the pooling and servicing agreements governing these trusts, servicers and trustees usually contain “default servicing provisions” which provide the servicer which much higher fees when the loan goes into default. Then the servicer also gets all sorts of other fees reimbursed to them upon a liquidation sale such as BPO fees, inspection fees, legal fees, etc. These fees may get paid to the servicer right away but may not be reimbursed until the sale goes through. But, here’s the BIG reason…

Very often, if not most of the times, these servicers were paid in full for all these loans when they acted as the sponsor and sold the Notes (assets) to these trusts. The trust investors put up a lump sum amount to the servicer and the servicer agreed to collect the monies, manage the escrow accounts and in turn, made a guarantee of cash flow payments to the trust each month. The trust investors are most worried about one thing… their monthly payment on the cash flow. If they keep getting their monthly cash payment, do you think they’re going to be screaming bloody murder? Probably not. As long as the check keeps coming, I got no qualms. Stop the checks and I’m going to be gettin’ all in your business. Think about it… haven’t you noticed a peculiar lack of lawsuits being filed by MBS trust investors or the trusts themselves? One would think the federal courts would be littered with lawsuits by these trusts against all the institutions in the securitization chain for all sorts of allegations regarding the massive losses you’d think they’re realizing due to the defaults.

So, to keep the investors out of their “business” the servicer has to figure out a way to keep those cash flow payments going. Well, let’s say I’m servicing a pool of 1000 loans and the monthly cash flow on that pool is $1 million (or $1000 per loan average). But my default rate starts rising and now 10% of these loans are not paying. Well, that’s $100,000 per month less that I’m getting as the servicer. Shoot, how do I keep making the payment of $1 million per month if I’m only receiving $900,000?

Oh, I got it! If I can foreclose on a couple homes in default, take a 64.7% loss on it but I still get $79,000 in one lump sum from each home I liquidate, I can keep making that cash payment to the trust. All I need to do is liquidate about 1.2 homes per month on average, and, even though I take a huge loss on these homes, I can keep making that cash flow payment to the trust, keep my investors happy and better yet, keep them out of my business and away from asking all sorts of questions I really don’t want to answer. Note: this game can only carry on for so long. At some point the pied piper is going to pipe…

This my best stab at a simplified answer to “why” these servicers are ignoring the Making Home Affordable program and foreclosing as fast as they possibly can. Nothing else makes sense to me. If you have any other input, I’d love to hear about in the forum on this topic.

The kicker here is that these servicers don’t have legal standing to foreclose. They don’t own the Note in 80%+ of the cases – and that number is probably higher than 90% of the time. So they unlawfully seize a family’s home, sell it even though they don’t own it and in the process they also violate the servicing agreements they are governed by. These agreements mandate that the servicer act in a fiduciary manner with respect to the interests of the investors. I can tell you unequivocally that taking an average 64.7% loss on a trust asset is worse for the trust versus modifying the loan at a higher amount (still with principal reduction for the borrower) and recapturing the interest. There is NO WAY the current servicer model of foreclose and liquidate passes the NPV test for these trust assets – at least as far as I can see.

For reference and further context, here is the article written by Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times.

So Many Foreclosures, So Little Logic

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

LAST week, the stock market tumbled on news that housing foreclosures and delinquencies rose again in the first quarter. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said that among the 34 million loans it tracks, foreclosures in progress rose 22 percent, to 844,389. That figure was 73 percent higher than in the same period last year.

But the comptroller’s office also said that amid the gloom, there was promising data about loan modifications: they rose 55 percent in the quarter. That growth came on a very low base, of course, but the move encouraged John C. Dugan, head of the comptroller’s office.

“As the administration’s ‘Making Home Affordable’ program gains traction and helps offset the impact of this very difficult economic cycle,” he said in a statement, “we should continue to see progress in future reports.”

A glimpse of second-quarter mortgage data, however, indicates that the progress Mr. Dugan and his colleagues in Washington are hoping for may take longer to emerge — raising questions about whether policymakers and banks are moving quickly or intelligently enough on the foreclosure problem.

Foreclosures remain one of the great financial ills for the economy. The Bush administration largely overlooked foreclosures affecting average homeowners, focusing instead on propping up elite, troubled financial institutions with taxpayer funds. The Obama administration has said it wants to wrestle the foreclosure issue to the ground by encouraging mortgage loan modifications, but its efforts have gotten little traction.

Loan modifications occur when a lender agrees to change terms of a troubled borrower’s mortgage; the most common approach is to reduce the loan’s interest rate. Cutting the amount of principal owed — an option that could be of more help to a borrower — is rare because it means homeowners pay less money back to the bank over time.

Lenders and their representatives, however, don’t like to modify loans through interest rate cuts or principal reductions because, of course, it reduces the income they receive from borrowers. No surprise, then, that loan modifications have been a trickle amid the recent foreclosure flood.

Enter the government, with the program it announced in March to encourage modifications. It offers incentives to loan servicers to change mortgage terms, providing $1,000 for each loan they modify. The program focuses on making payments more affordable through lower interest rates, but delinquent amounts and late fees are typically tacked onto the mortgage balance. “Making Home Affordable” does not compel lenders to reduce mortgage balances.

Servicers signed on to the program in April. The program’s early months were not covered by the O.C.C.’s first-quarter report. But other figures on modifications conducted in April, May and June are available. And they show a decline in modifications, not an increase as the government hoped.

Alan M. White, an assistant professor at the Valparaiso University law school in Indiana, analyzed data on 3.5 million subprime and alt-A mortgages in securitization pools overseen by Wells Fargo. The loans were written in 2005 through 2007; data on their performance is provided to the trusts’ investors. Mortgages handled by five of the nation’s largest loan servicing companies — Bank of America, Chase Home Finance and Litton Loan Servicing among them — are contained in the Wells Fargo data.

Mr. White found that mortgage modifications peaked in February and have declined in all but one month since. While servicers modified 23,749 loans in these trusts in February, they changed only 19,041 in May and 18,179 in June. This is exactly when servicers were supposed to be responding to the government’s loan modification urgings.

Foreclosures, meanwhile, keep rising. In June, 281,560 were in process, slightly above the 277,847 in May. Last January, there were about 242,000 foreclosures in the pipeline among the Wells Fargo trusts.

“I was hoping we would see some impact in June of the government’s program,” Mr. White said. “Is ‘Home Affordable’ working? My short answer is no.”

To be sure, the government’s data differs from that which Mr. White analyzed, and its loan modification figures for the second quarter may look better as a result. The O.C.C. includes prime loans as well as subprime, for example, while the Wells Fargo data contains no prime loans.

Nevertheless, Mr. White has collected the figures since November 2008, and he said that in the months since, the performance of the 3.5 million mortgages that he analyzes tracked the O.C.C. data pretty closely.

THE Wells Fargo data is illuminating. It shows that in June, 58 percent of modifications cut the payments that the borrower has to pay, a slightly smaller percentage than in April or May. The average reduction in June was $173 a month.

But the most fascinating, and frightening, figures in the data detail how much money is lost when foreclosed homes are sold. In June, the data show almost 32,000 liquidation sales; the average loss on those was 64.7 percent of the original loan balance.

Here are the numbers: the average loan balance began at almost $223,000. But in the liquidation sale, the property sold for $144,000 less, on average. Perhaps no other single figure shows how wildly the mortgage mania pumped up home prices. It also bodes poorly for the quality of the mortgage-related assets lurking in banks’ books.

Loss severities, like foreclosures, are rising. In November, losses averaged 56.1 percent of the original loan balance; in February, 63.3 percent.

Given losses like these, Mr. White said he was perplexed that lenders and their representatives were resisting reducing principal when they modify loans. His data shows how rare it is for lenders to reduce principal. In June, for example, 3,135 loans — just 17.2 percent of the total modified — involved write-downs of principal, interest or fees. The total loss from these write-downs was just $45 million in June.

And yet, the losses incurred in foreclosure sales involving loans in the securitization trusts were a staggering $4.59 billion in June. “There is 100 times as much money lost in foreclosure sales as there was in writing down balances in modifications,” Mr. White said. “That is not rational economic behavior.”

If banks have written down the value of these loans to the 40 cents on the dollar that they are fetching on foreclosures — the only true value for these homes right now — then why don’t they bite the bullet and reduce the loan amount outstanding for the troubled borrowers? That type of modification would be far more likely to succeed than larding a borrower who is hopelessly underwater with yet more arrears.

“You can reduce payments with a lot of gimmicks similar to those built into subprime loans — temporary rate reductions that defer a lot of principal, balloon payments,” Mr. White said. “To me that leads to a situation where American homeowners are paying 50 to 60 percent of their incomes for mortgages which reset in 2011 and 2012. That is not solving the problem.”

Certainly not for borrowers, that is. And because many of these losses will ultimately be passed on to taxpayers, it’s not solving our problem, either.