The in-laws are in financial trouble. They haven’t paid the mortgage in nearly a year and know that it’s a matter of time before being foreclosed on.
A few weeks ago, they got a letter from Greentree Service LLC. Some excerpts:
“informational notice”
“your account has been referred to an attorney to initiate foreclosure”
“Greentree may have sent you one or more solication communications”
“Please contact us to obtain a loss mitigation application package”.
I’m assuming that Greentree has absolutely nothing to do with the actual mortgage servicer or foreclosure action, right? They’re just trying to profit from the scenario, right?
I would not necessarily make that assumption. Mortgage papers get sold around a lot among financial institutions, and it’s possible they own the mortgage.
But surely there must be more – say, an amount overdue.
I guess they bought a bunch of mortgages from BoA (I didn’t read real closely - sorry) and people are having an AWFUL time with them. So to answer your questions, um, I don’t know?
Sorry - I just don’t have any personal experience with mortgages.
I would assume there’s a phone number somewhere in the paperwork that you could call. If you ask straight out “Do you own the mortgage on this house?”, you should hopefully get a straight answer. If they’re scammers, I suspect they could get in real trouble if they lied to you on that question. Failing that, you could them to send you documentation.
While it’s possible that they bought the loan, the previous lender is required to send a notification letter as well. If there hasn’t been any such letter, I would expect that Green Tree is just playing vulture.
Okay, when I first bought my house in 2003, my mortgage guy set up a second mortgage of 20% of the purchase price so I didn’t have to pay PMI. This was a 30-year ARM mortgage with a big fat balloon payment on the end. After a couple years, when the interest rates started creeping into Ludicrous territory, I went to eloan dot com and refinanced that second mortgage, to a fixed 15-year. Shortly thereafter, the Antichrist, Bank of America, bought that loan. They turned it over to GreenTree. I got a letter saying “You will now pay GreenTree; send your money here.”
I faithfully made payments to GreenTree for a few years and then this year, got a little windfall and was finally able to pay off that fucker for good. (I now own 20% more of my house. Yay!)
I share all that because I never had a single problem with the company. Well, actually I did have some minor glitches getting payments credited correctly, but one or two short and simple phone calls solved the problem. They didn’t even give me any hassles or headaches when it came time to release the lien. I went to my credit union to have the money wired (because I didn’t trust the check-mailing thing) directly, so we had to verify if that last payment went to GreenTree or BOA. GreenTree was the service agency of record, so that’s who we paid off.
So it is a legit mortgage servicing company. Not perfect, as any financial institution is probably not perfect. And BOA feeds their mortgages to them. I do not know if other banks feed mortgages to them or if it’s BOA’s baby. Personally, I’d rather be dragged naked and screaming through the streets of Baghdad rather than do business with BOA, ever. So I was perfectly happy with GreenTree, even if its daddy was Satan himself (BOA).
Now the foreclosure thing is a whole other kettle of fish. GreenTree is probably just responding to the “we haven’t gotten a payment in a year” thing. My understanding is not paying a mortgage is the main thing that triggers foreclosure. I don’t think they’re making it up, but your parents might want to see a bankruptcy attorney or something anyway.
I will note, on that link to Google with all the Green Tree complaints? The very first complaint I read was how horrible the company is because they charge $12 for an online payment, so the entire company should be dragged naked and screaming through the streets of Baghdad… :: roll eyes ::
Why would you even want to do that when you can use online banking with your own bank for free? (That’s how I made my payments right up until the payoff.) Some other complaints are along the lines of “OMG, they charge me for ESCROW! They want escrow padding! My shyster, fly-by-night mortgage lender who is now out of business never wanted padding in the escrow! WHAT IS ESCROW??? Green Tree should go out of business and then be dragged naked and screaming…”
A lot of people are complaining that the agents are rude. Huh. Maybe those people are rude customers. Like I said, I always got polite, professional, perfectly pleasant agents on the phone who solved my problems quickly and without any bullshit.
You get the idea. Take all the complaints with a grain of salt. People don’t read shit they sign. They don’t understand what they are undertaking when they sign on to a complicated transaction like buying a house. They don’t know what the words mean when the mortgage broker explains things and they are too overwhelmed and possibly embarrassed to ask questions.
Either way, you might want to go over to the in-laws’ house and look through their documentation and help them sort things out.
An update: the loan was indeed transferred to Greentree a few months ago, so it’s less of a scam than I’d feared.
They have seen a bankruptcy attorney (that’s been in the works for a while). So the foreclosure is indeed legit. I just thought this was a bottom-feeding opportunistic thing going on (kind of like if you’ve been given a big speeding ticket, you’ll get cold-calls from lawyers).
Read the link that Duckster gave you and realize that Greentree acts more like a skeevy debt collection agency than a mortgage company. The fact that a large number of people on that site say that they would rather deal with Bank of America should be a big clue as to what you are dealing with now. If you mail them anything, make them sign a receipt. If they call you, tell them you are recording the call for the purpose of “quality control”. Put down on any and all paperwork that it is "cc"ed to your attorney.
BTW, Dogzilla-why don’t you read some of the next thousand complaints on that one site alone? Taking a minor complaint from the first complaint, ignoring the all major complaints from that one and the rest of them, then throwing in an unwarranted assumption about why Greentree’s employees are rude, just because they didn’t screw with you personally? Really?
Sounds like a standard “Notice of Intent to Accelerate” letter. I don’t know their finanical situation (other than it’s dire) but they may want to go ahead and get a modification application from the company and submit it - couldn’t hurt.
It looks like your in-laws’ mortgage servicing transferred from Bank of America to Green Tree Servicing, LLC. Their underlying mortgage is most likely a conforming loan that was sold to Fannie Mae. You did not indicate whether anyone from Bank of America tried to contact your in-laws after they stopped making their monthly payments. It is clear that Green Tree, as the new mortgage servicer, is now attempting to contact them to determine what they plan to do about the mortgage, and then talk through next steps they need to take with this loan.
As part of the servicing transfer process, your in-laws were assigned a single point of contact at Green Tree. That person willl be able to assess their current financial situation and identify some possible avenues for resolving the debt. They should contact their Green Tree representative at their earliest convenience. If they have missed twelve payments, they may still be able to avoid foreclosure. Green Tree’s web site, GTServicing.com, has a link on its home page that offers assistance to homeowners who are facing financial hardship. You might want to check into what options (from loan modification to short-sale or deed-in-lieu) are available to help them avoid going through foreclosure.
Assuming this is legit, your parents have to make a choice prety quickly. If the laws in your state are the same as here, once the lawyer files foreclosure papers with the court, the mortgage company will no longer accept mortgage payments from your parents – not until the court case is resolved.
I dunno, maybe they don’t have a choice – if they can’t pay, they can’t pay. But if they can, they better think very carefully about whether they want to put the future of their home in the hands of lawyers and courts.
Greentree bought my mortgage from BoA, and I haven’t had any trouble.
Re: all the letters - when my dad passed away, it was a couple of months before we could liquidate some stuff and get the mortgage paid. It was a local bank, and I was in constant contact with them via telephone, but due to new regulations on foreclosures, I got mail all the time, informing me of my rights, etc, including five different registered letters.
Yeah, the $12 is a joke, but they are probably just following regulations.
They won’t be making mortgage payments to anyone. The only way the company would get any money from them would be if we (or they!) were to win the lottery and be able to bring things current. Hell, even if we did win the lottery, the place is underwater and we’d do better to buy them a new place.
It’s not a surprise that the place is going into foreclosure, they have indeed defaulted. We were just concerned that this letter sounded a lot like “I noticed the filing in the courts. I’m sure we can help you” (while scamming every penny they could from people who have no pennies to spare). But since Greentree did indeed take over the servicing a while back, this isn’t as out of the blue as I’d thought.
After a decade of perfectly competent servicing by citimortgage, my loan was sold to Greentree, and while they haven’t done anything to screw me yet, I’m finding them to pretty amateurish so far.
They want to charge me for paying them electronically? Fuck that noise - I can push from my bank instead of pulling from my mortgage processor, but that’s complete nonsense.
I can’t seem to find any setting on their website to get email - rather than snail mail - notices of payments due.
I filled out their web ‘contact us’ form to inquire about how to handle the payment (them or citimortgage) right during the switchover, since some of the documentation I received was contradictory. A full week after sending the question, I got this:
[QUOTE=Greentree]
Thank you for your recent inquiry. We are in the process of retrieving and reviewing the origination and servicing files and other information on the subject matter, in order to fully investigate your inquiry. Once all the relevant documentation has been reviewed and the matter has been discussed with any relevant Green Tree Servicing LLC personnel involved, we will provide you with a written response.
[/QUOTE]
In the meantime, I got a call from them wondering where the payment was, and when I mentioned that I had sent them a question on their website, the rep who called me seemed unaware that contacting Greentree customer service via a web form was even possible.
These guys are simply not competent to be in this business, but unfortunately, I have no control over who services my mortgage. I’m disappointed, but I can go to my bank website monthly and send a payment. If my interaction with Greentree going forward is limited to that, then I can live with it, but I have a sense of foreboding that they’re going to botch a few things…
My opinion of the latter is well documented in the linked thread, and
Rates have dropped enough in 10 years that you could almost certainly refinance to a significantly lower rate, probably even with the same (or shorter) ultimate payoff date.
We were lucky that when our primary mortgage was sold, it was sold to FNMA and our credit union is continuing the servicing, so it’s pretty transparent.
But seriously, TIME TO REFINANCE and get away from both of those companies as soon as you can possibly do it.
As a side note: the in-laws’ place finally went up for its official foreclosure hearing in front of a judge. As they weren’t contesting it, they didn’t even attend. The formal letter saying judgement was awarded to the mortgage company arrived the week I was down there helping them move.