Over the last 18 months, the Egglestons have watched one house after another on their street, Gardenview Drive, end up foreclosed and vacant. Although lawns are still tidy and empty homes are not boarded up and stripped as they are in inner-city Cleveland, the Egglestons say Maple Heights no longer feels safe after dark. Nor do they have the confidence they had when they moved in a decade ago that this is the ideal place to raise their 6-year-old twin girls, Sydney and Shelby.
The Countrywide-specific stuff starts on the second page:
If foreclosures ultimately harm underlying property values and cause losses to both lender and borrower, why are they still so prevalent?
“Some lenders understand; others don’t,” Mr. Seifert says. “Countrywide doesn’t.” Out of 120 recent mortgages cases with Countrywide, Mr. Seifert says, 15 have resulted in work-out deals, only two of which he said were “very good.”
One of those loans belonged to Audrey Sweet, a Maple Heights resident and a first-time home buyer who borrowed $118,000 from Countrywide in late 2004 without putting any money down. Because of Mrs. Sweet’s poor credit history and lack of assets, the adjustable loan’s rate was 10.25 percent, but she says she was told that if the couple “just proved themselves,” they could quickly refinance at a lower rate.
Mrs. Sweet says Countrywide advised her that the monthly property tax bill would be $100, but it turned out to be $230 and the Sweets quickly fell behind. Countrywide stepped in and paid $3,493 in back taxes in March 2007, and the next month raised the Sweets’ monthly mortgage bill to $1,713 from $1,055.
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