Beware of foreclosure scammers

You get what you pay for, right? Well ... If you live by that rule of thumb and you're trying to avoid foreclosure, you'll seek out a for-profit foreclosure consultant who will charge you for any services provided. But consumer-protection advocates say you're much better off going to a nonprofit housing counseling agency that will work with you for free.

Reason No. 1 is pretty obvious.

"They're charging a lot of money for something the homeowners don't need to be paying those kinds of sums for," Robert Strupp, director of research and policy with the Community Law Center, says of foreclosure consultants.

It's thousands of dollars in some cases, he says. Any money you don't shell out for foreclosure help is money you could use to pay late fees and other lender penalties.

Ruth L. Griffin of the Maryland Housing Counselors Network says the only thing a nonprofit approved by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development might ask a struggling borrower to pay is an incidental cost such as the expense of ordering a credit report. There's a list of those groups at www.hud.gov/foreclosure.

Strupp and the Maryland Attorney General's Office say you're also putting yourself at risk of being scammed if you go anywhere but a HUD-approved nonprofit.

"We have several suits currently pending against people who were purporting to offer foreclosure rescue and in fact took the houses," says Bill Gruhn, chief of the attorney general's consumer protection division.

In Gruhn's opinion, this is not a shop-around situation. When I asked if a borrower who does some due diligence first should sign on with a for-profit consultant, his answer was succinct: "No."

As nonprofit counselors get overloaded with people seeking help, Strupp worries that homeowners will turn to for-profit consultants by default. But attorneys are starting to volunteer their time, and more nonprofit counselors are on the job than before.

"We weren't really doing this last year ... but there was so much volume that we really felt like we needed to help," says Felix Torres Colon, executive director of Neighborhood Housing Services of Baltimore, a nonprofit lender that now does foreclosure counseling too. The group sees about 240 homeowners a month, he says.

"Helping people with foreclosure is very difficult; some people have really impossible situations," Torres Colon says. "So if anyone tells you it's going to be really easy and quick and all you have to do is pay a few bucks, run away." (By Jamie Smith, Baltimore Sun)

To help the homeowners

The Maryland State Bar Association had published the brochure that covers the basics of foreclosure proceeding in Maryland. It is accessible from Bar's website: http://tinyurl.com/68pydd

A man using Craigslist to aid in his renting of properties he did not own was arrested late Thursday night, Fairfax County police said.

Richard Hiner, 31, of Catlett, allegedly advertised rental homes on Craigslist, bringing potential renters on tours of the properties and then having them sign a rental contract with a down payment.
His victims would later learn the properties were bank-owned and in foreclosure.
Police were notified of the scheme by four victims between July 13 and July 18.
Detectives posing as potential renters responded to an online advertisement and arrested Hiner when he arrived for the meeting.

Baltimore condo sales plummeting in tough residential real estate market

Homeowners worried about the sliding value of their home have at least one thing to be grateful for — the condominium market might be even worse.

“The condo market is hurting from same factors hurting the general home market,” said Jody Landers, executive vice president of the Greater Baltimore Board of Realtors. “Financing isn’t easy, and people are deciding this isn’t the time to buy.”

Both new condo sales and condo resales in the Baltimore metro area are well behind last year’s pace, according to midyear data released last week by Delta Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based real estate research firm. Since last spring, condo values have also dropped slightly more than local home values, according to the data.

Just 59 new condos were sold in Baltimore City and Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Harford and Howard counties during the second quarter, down from 303 in the same quarter last year.

In the first quarter, a net of just 13 condos were sold in the metro area, and Baltimore City reported new condo sales of -119, which Delta attributed to cancellations of contracts already signed.

For the year ending June 30, 109 new condos were sold, down 90 percent from 1,101 in the 12 months ending June 30, 2007, according to Delta’s figures.

Condo resales are on pace for a 50 percent decline this year, according to the data. Through May 31, 919 condo resales were reported in the metro region, an average of 184 per month. But last year, 3,237 resales were reported, an average of 270 per month.

Median resale prices in the Baltimore area fell 4.7 percent in May to $225,214 from $236,223 during the same month a year ago.

“They’re not immune to the rest of the market,” said David Martz, a Realtor with Long and Foster Fells Point specializing in condos. “To me, except for the [condo] fee, there’s no difference between a condo resale and a regular town home resale.”

By comparison, metro-area home prices fell 1.14 percent in May and sales volume was down 30.4 percent from the same month a year before, according to data gathered by Realtor-owned Metropolitan Regional Information Systems. MRIS data include condo sales as well as single-family sales.

But Delta’s numbers, especially the number of contracts broken, are reported by the condo developers themselves and so could be suspect, said Ross Mackesey, sales manager with Coldwell Bank Federal Hill who has represented about 50 condo projects.

He said the numbers could also be unintentionally skewed by new, large developments such as those in Harbor East throwing many units on the market at once.

“The Baltimore condo market is finite enough that we can actually look at Delta’s numbers and pin down events that skewed them,” Mackesey said. “But that doesn’t mean year-over-year [numbers] ... don’t have some validity.” (by Aaron Cahall, The Examiner)