Rescue
Foreclosure fund planned
FAME Renaissance Assistance Corporation has launched a drive to raise $50 million to help home owners who are in foreclosure (and can be extricated) as well as those in pre-foreclosure or delinquent save their homes.
According to Denise Hunter, president and chief operating officer of the corporation, the fund will enable the organization to purchase the troubled loans from banks and refinance them at a five percent fixed interest rate, and FAME will service the loans.
“We hope to launch the program by June or July,” said Hunter admitting that the timetable is ambitious. “We are working to bring pressure to bear on those lending institutions that have taken advantage of the community, and get them to do the right thing,” she added.
“This is character lending, and we’re targeting people who been paying their mortgage for years, and now find themselves having been taken advantage of (i.e. put into subprime loans, when they did not need to be). We just want to save people’s homes.”
For more information about the program, call (800) 283-0347.
LOS ANGELES, Calif. — Standard home sales — the kind involving non-distressed properties — rose to a 5-year high last month, and pending home sales climbed nearly 15 percent above the previous month, the California Association of Realtors reported today.
Disappointed with the federal effort to reach the more than 4 million homeowners affected by the foreclosure crisis, a number of housing advocates are calling on the government to drop the Dec. 31, 2012, enrollment deadline for independent review of their cases, because the review program has so far reached only a fraction of those potentially eligible to receive compensation.
Well over 4 million homeowners affected by the foreclosure crisis are eligible for an independent review of their cases—but only a small percentage of them have requested one through a recently available federal program, and the deadline to do so is looming.
The Independent Foreclosure Review allows eligible current and former homeowners to have their foreclosure files reviewed by independent consultants. Homeowners who were financially harmed by abuses or errors of their mortgage servicers will be eligible for compensation.
For 28 years Ronald and Valerie Jackson lived on Harlan Avenue in Carson. They raised their three children there, had started on the grandkids and had accumulated years of happy memories.
Valerie worked as a civilian employee for the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department, and Ronald worked for the city of Los Angeles, before becoming a real estate investor.
Then the real estate market crashed, and “so did I,” said Ronald of his 2008 economic slump.
SACRAMENTO—Attorney General Kamala D. Harris announced that claim forms will be sent to approximately 432,584 California borrowers who lost their homes to foreclosure between Jan. 1, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2011, and may be eligible for a settlement payment under the $25 billion national mortgage foreclosure settlement.
