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Kenneth R. Harney: Short-sale fraud hurts banks, homeowners
Sunday, June 5, 2011 - WASHINGTON — Are banks and distressed home sellers
getting rooked on a massive scale in the booming short-sale arena — leaving
hundreds of millions of dollars on the table for white-collar criminals?
A comprehensive new study estimates they will lose more than $375 million this
year when they sell undervalued houses to tag teams consisting of realty agents and
investors.
CoreLogic, a large real estate and mortgage data research firm in Santa Ana, Calif.,
studied 450,000 short-sale transactions across the country during the past two years,
and offered these telling examples of how lenders are losing big bucks:
• A house in Kings Beach, Calif., was bought near the height of the boom in 2005 for
$530,000. On Oct. 28, 2009, it was sold in a short sale — an arrangement in which
the lender allows the delinquent owner to avoid foreclosure by selling to a third
party — for $247,500 to an investment group. Later that day, the investors resold
the house to a noninvestor purchaser for $375,000. This produced $127,500 profit for
the investment group — in a matter of hours.
• A house in Gilbert, Ariz., sold for $400,000 in 2006. On March 2, 2010, it was
bought in a short sale by investors for $220,000 and resold the same day for
$267,500 — a gain of $47,500.
What's going on? Law enforcement and bank industry experts say it's frequently
fraud: Local real estate agents partner with investor groups. The agent's job is to
spot borrowers in financial distress — usually people underwater on their
mortgages. They persuade the homeowners to sell to investors in a short sale at a
low price. Then they contact the bank with the investors' short-sale offer.
Meanwhile, the agent finds legitimate buyers who are willing to pay more for the
property, but the agent never presents their offers to the bank. To back up the
investors' lowball offer, the realty agent produces an appraisal or a "BPO" — a
broker price opinion of the distressed home value that confirms the low valuation.
The bank then sells to the investment group. After closing, the investors sell the
house to the legitimate purchasers at the higher price, and the realty agent and the
investors split the profits.
According to the CoreLogic study, 65 percent of short sales that are resold within six
months for profits of 40 percent or higher are "suspicious" — with a significant
possibility the lender accepted a low payoff. Most of these transactions go undetected
by the banks being defrauded, but some lead to prosecutions and convictions.
For example, Connecticut real estate agents Anna McElaney and Sergio Natera
currently are awaiting sentencing hearings in connection with guilty pleas in federal
court to short-sale bank fraud. According to the U.S. attorney's office in
Connecticut, McElaney and Natera participated in a scheme in which Regions Bank,
whose headquarters are in Alabama, agreed to a $102,375 short sale on a house it
financed in Bridgeport, Conn. The buyer was BOS Asset Management LLC, an
investment company controlled by Natera. Unknown to Regions Bank, however,
listing agent McElaney had earlier received a signed purchase contract from a
private buyer for $132,500. After closing at the lower price, BOS resold the property
to the private buyer, yielding Natera and McElaney a fast $30,125 profit.
Though banks are the primary victims, homeowners can be hurt too. When owners
are pressured to sell to investor groups for less than the highest offer available,
they end up deeper in debt to the lender. In the majority of states where banks can
pursue borrowers for mortgage balance deficiencies following a foreclosure or short
sale, homeowners may be subject to debt collection by banks at the very time they
can least afford it. But the bottom line here, as seen in the Connecticut guilty pleas,
is that short-sale thievery is federal bank fraud. Realty agents and investors who
participate in these schemes risk prison terms up to 30 years, big fines plus
restitution of the funds they stole.