The Herald reports the mayor made the plea to help about 500 property owners immediately.
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foreclosure
By adamg - 12/12/08 - 3:24 pm
The state Attorney General's office has gotten a temporary restraining order against a mortgage broker who allegedly soaked troubled homeowners for fees he claimed would help him stave off their foreclosures. According to the lawsuit filed against David Coleman of Methuen yesterday:
... Coleman would target vulnerable homeowners on the brink of foreclosure by combing newspapers for victims' contact information in foreclosure notices. He would then allegedly make unsolicited calls to the homeowners where he would offer to save their homes from foreclosure by assisting them in filing for bankruptcy in exchange for a $1,000 cash fee upfront. The complaint further states that Coleman held himself out to consumers as a bankruptcy expert and an attorney, even though he does not hold a license to practice law in Massachusetts or in any other state. ... In many instances, the bankruptcy petitions were deficient and dismissed because they were incomplete or lacked the proper information. Homeowners allege that when they attempted to contact Coleman about these deficiencies, he was either not reachable or, if reached, he brushed off consumers’ concerns. ...
By adamg - 12/9/08 - 4:24 pm
Terry Klein alerts us to a Supreme Judicial Court ruling today that forbids a company that made "unfair" mortgages to people who could not possibly repay them from simply foreclosing on them.
The ruling in Commonwealth v. Fremont Investment & Loan only applies to roughly 2,500 mortgages issues by Fremont, a California company, between 2004 and 2007, but it could give the state an additional legal weapon to keep people in homes they purchased with subprime loans.
The court agreed that Fremont's mortgages, typically requiring no money down but with a 20% "piggy-back loan," all with adjustable rates, were "unfair" because there was no way borrowers could ever hope to repay them unless housing prices continued to rise indefinitely and they could ultimately sell their properties. Loans made on the foreclosure value of a property rather than the borrower's ability to pay "lies at the heart of predatory lending," and Fremont could not evade a state ban on foreclosures by selling the mortgages to another company.
By adamg - 9/26/08 - 12:07 pm
The Boston Business Journal reports:
Massachusetts was one of Washington Mutual Inc.'s biggest markets for risky subprime mortgages, whose skyrocketing defaults contributed to the failure of the nation’s largest savings and loan. ...
By adamg - 9/25/08 - 5:12 pm
Rowe Street protest doesn't stop police. Couple had signed up for a mortgage worth as much as their monthly income; then they couldn't find somebody to pay as much as they'd thought they could get in rent and they fell behind.
By adamg - 9/5/08 - 1:48 pm
Open Media Boston reports on an attempt to keep a resident of a foreclosed condo at 76 Perrin St. from being evicted.
Some 50 activists from City Life/Vida Urbana showed up, and six chained themselves to the front and rear entrances, but Boston Police cut the chains, arrested four of the six and then stood guard as a moving company got rid of the woman's belongings. She says she had offered to pay rent to current owner Bank of America, but the bank said no.
By adamg - 8/21/08 - 10:15 pm
Chris Lovett continues his exploration of the shark-infested triple-decker/condo market in Dorchester:
... A review of more than 200 conversions over the last two years in Boston - mostly in Dorchester and Roxbury - shows more than 100 foreclosure filings against owners who bought more than one unit, sometimes in the same building. Names that appear as unit buyers with mortgage trouble sometimes turn up later as investors converting more units, or as people with power of attorney to represent other buyers.
By adamg - 5/16/08 - 3:08 pm
Councilor Mike Ross reports the council passed a home-rule petition yesterday:
... When a foreclosure occurs on a rental property, this bill gives the renter the right to stay in their home, so long as they continue to pay the rent they were paying prior to foreclosure, and assuming they remain a tenant in good standing. This situation remains until one of two things happen:
1. The lender sells the foreclosed property to a new landlord or owner, who has the right to select their own tenants if they so choose; or
By adamg - 5/14/08 - 1:33 pm
Stephen Rosenberg discusses lawsuits against State Street Corp. by pension funds that say the company improperly invested their money in risky real-estate funds - which could leave the company vulnerable to hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of damages if it loses:
... [I]t may well be that the administrators' fiduciary duties under those circumstances require them to then try to remedy their initial mistakes by suing to recover the losses, rather than compounding their own fiduciary breaches by simply absorbing the loss; that latter course of action would likely just make the administrators themselves targets for breach of fiduciary duty lawsuits based on their own mistakes in investing in the State Street funds. ...
By adamg - 5/7/08 - 1:20 pm
Mass. foreclosures up 38% in the first quarter of this year, compared to last year.
By adamg - 3/27/08 - 11:28 am
Boston Business Journal: The fourth quarter of 2007 saw the highest number of foreclosures in state history ...
By Barbara Diamond - 3/22/08 - 11:50 am
"I want to shame them," Grossack said of attorneys Mark Harmon and Jason Greenberg. "They're not doing anything illegal. But it's not halachically correct, and it's not helping the Jewish community."
By adamg - 3/22/08 - 11:50 am
Looks like all the sharks in the mortgage racket are now being joined by sharks in the foreclosure resale market:
In one instance, three friends made the winning bid of $130,000 on a house in Lee. The mortgage company delayed the closing, then sent a letter in February offering to return the deposit. Before the friends responded, the company put the house back on the market for $179,000, then quickly agreed to sell it to someone else.
By adamg - 3/10/08 - 5:41 pm
Milan Kohut had been charged with peddling without a license when police objected to him standing outside a Financial District branch of the Bank of America with a pile of nooses and a sign reading "Nooses on sale."
On Friday, a Boston Municipal Court judge dismissed the charges, the Dig reports. Kohut had argued he was making a political comment about the mortgage crisis, not actually trying to sell downtown workers a way to hang themselves. He's now asking for his nooses back.
By adamg - 3/9/08 - 2:36 pm
| Foreclosing costs Owners aren't the only ones caught in the mortgage crisis. Renters, like this East Boston family of immigrants, are feeling the fallout, too. |
New benchmark for luxury living Mandarin Oriental's posh rentals are likely to fill quickly, even in slump. |
By adamg - 3/8/08 - 9:53 pm
Outside of the Red Line corridor, the prices of Dorchester housing units - especially multi-family properties - are crashing, the Dorchester Reporter reports. The mortgage crisis may not be the only reason:
... A less examined reason for the sinking market could be a decrease in fraud brought about by increased media and governmental focus on the sub-prime lending crisis. Several properties previously detailed in the Reporter appear to have been sold under curious circumstances. ...
By adamg - 2/28/08 - 3:58 pm
Chris Lovett reports on a meeting of the mayor's Foreclosure Intervention Team yesterday morning:
"We're not as bad as '93 and '94, but we never want to get there," said the mayor. "And all the predictions we get are the worst is yet to come."
Lovett also provides a map showing properties which not only have been foreclosed but for which the owning banks have been unable to find buyers.
By adamg - 2/21/08 - 2:12 pm
Chris Lovett tells us way more about the Dorchester Street that saw a brief flurry of city action after the Herald wrote about foreclosures there (months after the Dorchester Reporter first reported on them):
... But even the best of times on Hendry Street are part of a long, troubled history. The street has been periodically infamous for crime problems, going back at least to the anti-drug campaigns led by Georgette Watson in the mid-1980s. And the rash of foreclosures—at least 12 properties on Hendry, Clarkson, and Coleman Streets counted by city officials—quickly spread through an area dominated by absentee ownership, much of it by a trust for one family. ...
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