Bank Appologizes for Error that Nearly Cost a Ft. Worth Man His Home
4/30/2010
Source: By Sandra Baker, Ft. Worth Star-Telegram Online

Freda Snowden's months-long ordeal to stop a bank from wrongly seizing a house her son owns in far south Fort Worth has ended.

Bank of America apologized this week and agreed to pay for damage to the three-bedroom house on Oldham Court caused by agents the bank hired to secure the property for foreclosure.

Snowden said bank executives admitted that their records had a coding error and know they have no claim to the property. She said it was frustrating trying to get anyone at the bank to listen to her, let alone return phone calls and e-mails.

"We have corrected the error in our files," said Ginny Zoraster, a media relations officer with Bank of America, in an e-mail response to questions. "Bank of America has contacted and apologized to the realtor and the homeowner."

Snowden calls the ordeal, which sent her through several layers of bank bureaucracy to get the problem fixed, a nightmare.

"If it's happening to me, how many other families is this happening to?" she said. "These last four months has taken at least 10 years off my life."

The bank, she said, was preparing to foreclose on the previous owner. That person bought the house in March 2007 and defaulted on the loan nine months later, deed records show.

Ira Rheingold, executive director of the Washington-based National Association of Consumer Advocates, said he's not aware of this problem happening elsewhere, but he's also not surprised by it. He said it's a reflection of a "screwed-up" mortgage system in which one company might originate a loan, another might own it, and yet another might collect and record payments, called servicing.

"The fact that nobody knows what they really own," he said, shows "how broken the system is. Record-keeping is terrible. This is a worst-case example of the lack of accountability."

Strange break-ins

Snowden said her 29-year-old son bought the 1,460-square-foot house in a September 2008 foreclosure auction and moved in a month later. He put in new appliances, changed light fixtures and was enjoying his house, she said.

That changed in November 2009, when he returned home one day to find that the house had been broken into. Nothing was taken, but someone had tried to re-key the home's locks.

Not feeling safe, he put the house up for sale in December and moved out, she said.

In February, the house was broken into again and the locks re-keyed. And again, nothing was taken.

Police suggested that squatters might be entering the house, Snowden said.

The mystery started to clear a few days later when a real estate agent was showing the house and an uninvited man walked in. When the agent asked why he was there, he said the bank hired his company to re-key the house because of a pending foreclosure.

Snowden immediately called her son's lender and the title companies for the sale, she said. All assured her that yes, her son owned the house. "I started calling everyone at Bank of America. No one would talk to me," Snowden said.

Persistence pays off

Eventually, a representative in the bank's foreclosure department confirmed that the bank's records wrongly showed that the original buyer still owned the property, and not that the foreclosure had been settled, Snowden said.

Snowden said she pursued other officials in the bank's foreclosure department to clear the matter, without results. She accumulated two file folders stuffed with deed records, closing papers and other documents to prove her case.

Finally, this week a senior loan services specialist with a bank subsidiary, BAC Field Services in Plano, called her.

He also sent an e-mail, saying "please be assured that the required steps have been taken and there will be no further attempts to secure or maintain the property."

For now, Snowden says repairs have cost her more than $600, but while the bank is reimbursing her, the problem goes beyond physical damage.

The stress has caused many sleepless nights and lost days from work, she said.

"It's a dream to have a home," Snowden said. "I have every right to be angry. I have every right to be upset."