More than two years ago, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau enacted rules about the ways mortgage servicers could operate and interact with borrowers, but a new report finds that many of these servicing companies continue to go about (bad) business as usual, using failed technology that has already harmed American homeowners.
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mortgage servicers
4 Things We Learned About Why Mortgage Servicers Continue To Stink
Banks Hired "Burger King Kids" To Process Mortgages
JPMorgan & Chase had a cute name, the “Burger King Kids,” for the workers with little no experience or qualifications it hired to process the reams of mortgages it plowed through at the height of the housing bubble. These walk-in hires “barely knew what a mortgage was,” writes the NYT. The newbies Citigroup and GMAC/Ally Bank outsourced the work to sometimes tossed paperwork into the garbage can. [More]
FTC: Countrywide Mowed Your Lawn, Marked Up The Cost And Called It A Fee
The FTC says that Countrywide (now part of Bank of America) has agreed to pay $108 million to settle charges that the company “collected excessive fees from cash-strapped borrowers were were struggling to keep their homes.” So, what exactly did they do? Well apparently, while acting as a mortgage servicer, the company actually hired vendors to service properties after the homeowners had fallen behind on their mortgages, marked up the cost of the services (lawn mowing and property inspections, for example,) and then passed the cost along as fees. Doesn’t sound legal? It wasn’t. [More]