IT'S OUR HOME: A FORECLOSURE NIGHTMARE BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LOCAL GMAC BANK

"People ask me, 'How do you put up with this?' I have no choice," Michael Negrea said. "It has cost us a fortune. We don't make that much. But it's our home."


The Eastlake couple's story started in 1995, when they built their modest 2,400-square-foot colonial and borrowed $200,000. They refinanced in 1998 with a local mortgage company, which sold the loan to Advanta Mortgage Corp.


The loan was sold a year later to Nation's Credit, then it was sold to Homecomings Financial/GMAC, with the loan being serviced by Fairbanks Capital Corp., one of the nation's most notorious mortgage lenders. The Federal Trade Commission in 2003 sued Fairbanks for deceptive and illegal practices, including not posting customer payments, and the company agreed that year pay $40 million in damages.

Sometime while Fairbanks was in the picture for the Negreas, two payments didn't get posted.


A foreclosure was filed in 2001 on behalf of Homecomings, which owned the loan.

When attorneys for both sides sat down in 2003, they worked out a written settlement:


The Negreas started making normal payments again in early 2004.
By June, GMAC sent another default letter.

After the couple sent their December payment, it wasn't cashed. The next month, in January 2005, GMAC again filed for foreclosure and wouldn't back down.


In 2008, the couple got a statement from GMAC demanding payment for its attorneys in the second foreclosure case -- the one in which GMAC lost the counterclaim. "How can you ask for legal fees when you paid our legal fees?" Michael Negrea asked.

Their attorney Futterer asked for a large enough award from GMAC to wipe out their roughly $200,00 mortgage forever (in 2003). By the time they got the $217,244 settlement more than three years later -- in 2009 -- GMAC had again added on more than $50,000 worth of fees.

The couple had been making normal payments last year when GMAC again stopped cashing them, saying they owed a lump sum of nearly $310,000 plus attorneys' fees on their $208,000 mortgage.

In August 2009, GMAC/Homecomings filed for foreclosure again, this time in federal court instead of common pleas court. "We feel they're court-shopping," Futterer said. The trial is set for January.



The Negreas are ecstatic that GMAC's practices may finally be coming to light, even though the accusations so far are limited to whether GMAC gave false information about foreclosures.

http://blog.cleveland.com/pdextra/2010/10/willoughby_couple_foreclosed_u.html

SEE ALSO:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Home-Mortgage-Law-Show-sponsored-by-Morris-duPont-Mansfield-PA/160832907268261