I can’t for the life of me understand the continued backlash on the borrower when it is the responsibility of the lender’s Underwriters who were supposed to make sure that the borrower could afford the mortgage.
The system was and is broken because neither the Lender nor the Broker had any incentive to make sure the loan was sound and that the borrow was qualified. IN fact, since it was not their money on the line, they could care less.
AS a senior mortgage underwriter, Keysha Cooper was proud of her ability to spot fraud and other problems in a loan application. A decade of vetting mortgage documents had taught her plenty, she says.
“At WaMu it wasn’t about the quality of the loans; it was about the numbers,” Ms. Cooper says. “They didn’t care if we were giving loans to people that didn’t qualify. Instead, it was how many loans did you guys close and fund?”
“They started giving loan officers free trips if they closed so many loans, fly them to Hawaii for a month,” Ms. Cooper recalls. “One of my account reps went to Jamaica for a month because he closed $3.5 million in loans that month.”
“If a loan came from a top loan officer, they didn’t care what the situation was, you had to make that loan work,” she says. “You were like a bad person if you declined a loan.”
One loan file was filled with so many discrepancies that she felt certain it involved mortgage fraud. She turned the loan down, she says, only to be scolded by her supervisor.
“She told me, ‘This broker has closed over $1 million with us and there is no reason you cannot make this loan work,’ ” Ms. Cooper says. “I explained to her the loan was not good at all, but she said I had to sign it.”
Ms. Cooper said the team manager told her to “restructure” the loan to make it work. “I said, how can you restructure fraud? This is a fraudulent loan,” she recalls.
Ms. Cooper says that her bosses placed her on probation for 30 days for refusing to approve the loan and that her team manager signed off on the loan.
Four months later, the loan was in default, she says. The borrower had not made a single payment. “They tried to hang it on me,” Ms. Cooper said, “but I said, ‘No, I put in the system that I am not approving this loan.’ ”
Ms. Cooper’s biggest regret, she says, is that she did not reject more loans. “I swear 60 percent of the loans I approved I was made to,” she says. “If I could get everyone’s name, I would write them apology letters.”
Do you know why they didn’t care if the borrower could pay or if the transaction was fraudulent??
I will tell you why, because it didn’t matter to them, they got paid either way for the full amount of the Note. Which leads me to another point, just who is entitled to foreclose on the home?
The Bank you thought was the Lender has been paid in full for your loan and is now called a Servicer making an additional 2.5% on your monthly payment.
The owners of the Mortgage backed Securities are the true owners of the Note, but in some cases the same Note has been sold into 3 different pools. In addition, some of those Notes were insured by AIG which protected the investor who in that case would have also been paid on your Note.
So at the time your home is getting foreclosed, your Note could have been paid in full twice and they also are going after the house as well. Does this sound like a system we should have any sympathy for??
My question is, what happened to all of that money paid to the supposed Lender who sold the Note to the Investors to be bundled as securities?? That was free money, where did it go??
