Bank of America Extends Foreclosure Freeze to All States
The plan swept states with some of the highest foreclosure levels, including California, Nevada and Arizona, into a swelling crisis over lenders’ flawed paperwork that had been mostly confined to 23 other states that require judicial review of foreclosures.
Bank of America instituted a partial freeze last week in those 23 states, and three other major mortgage lenders have done the same. The bank’s decision on Friday increased pressure on other lenders to extend their moratoriums nationwide as well.
An immediate effect of the action will be a temporary stay of execution for hundreds of thousands of borrowers in default. The bank said it would be brief, a mere pause while it made sure its methods were in order.
But as the furor grows over lenders’ attempts to bypass legal rules in their haste to reclaim houses from delinquent owners, there is a growing expectation that foreclosures will dwindle for months as the foreclosure system is reworked.
Stan Humphries, an economist with the housing site Zillow.com, said what was initially cast as a problem of sloppy record-keeping is rapidly evolving into one that suggests the banks’ procedures for recording loans might not have followed the law.
“The former scenario represents a hiccup for the market, maybe a 30- to 90-day slowdown in foreclosure initiations,” Mr. Humphries said. “The latter scenario is more like hitting a wall.”
The uncertainty is putting the housing market in turmoil and causing vast confusion. Bank of America, for example, said it was not halting sales of foreclosed properties to new owners, but Fannie Mae, the giant mortgage holding company, is doing exactly that with properties it bought from Bank of America.
One real estate agent in Florida said Friday that he had six deals involving former Bank of America properties that had been at least temporarily scuttled. Representatives for Fannie, which was taken over by federal regulators after it failed two years ago, did not return calls.
Real estate agents said the extent of any disruption depended on how long the moratorium lasted, how many lenders ultimately participated — and what people in default decided to do.
“If it’s still January, February, March, and they’re not foreclosing, you’ll see a big effect,” said Jim Klinge, an agent in San Diego. “It’ll be a banker’s holiday, free rent for everybody and a lawyers’ gold mine.”
As soon as Bank of America announced its freeze in a terse press release, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Edolphus Towns, the New York Democrat who leads the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, both pointedly asked other lenders to follow suit.
Increased pressure also came from Christopher J. Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, who announced a Nov. 16 hearing on foreclosures.
The other lenders, however, did not seem to be swayed.
JPMorgan Chase, which has halted foreclosures in the 23 states where they need a judge’s permission, says it is putting hundreds of lawyers and executives to work addressing what it characterizes as a “technical” paperwork problem with 56,000 mortgages with improper documentation. Officials have no plans to halt foreclosures nationwide, and believe they can fix the problems within weeks, they said.
Chase officials acknowledge they had a flawed process, but they say they have not mistakenly foreclosed on any homeowners, because the underlying information is accurate. People close to the bank say that about one-third of the properties tied to mortgages under scrutiny are vacant, in line with their assessment of the overall industry.
The average borrower that Chase has foreclosed on, these people added, has not made a payment on the mortgage for about one and a half years — a figure that they say is also consistent with the industry.
Inside Citigroup, which has not suspended foreclosures, officials said they were breathing a sigh of relief. Sanjiv Das, the head of CitiMortgage, began a review of loan servicing processes about 18 months ago in anticipation of a groundswell of foreclosures.
At that time, Citi stepped up its employee training and tightened its documentation processes, giving officials there confidence that they have sidestepped the document issue. But given the huge number of mortgages it processed and its sprawling operations, Citi — which has faced one embarrassment after another — is not publicly declaring victory.
On Friday, Wells Fargo, another big lender that has not halted foreclosures, continued to maintain that its foreclosure processes were accurate and said it was not planning to initiate a nationwide moratorium.
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Eric Dash and Binyamin Appelbaum contributed reporting.
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