OLYMPIA — Tony Brooks blames a mortgage broker for the loss of his home, and wanted state lawmakers to know his story.
Brooks, 48, drove twice to Olympia from Seattle in the span of a week to testify for a crackdown on brokers, even after he was turned away by a Senate committee the first time.
“There are predatory lenders out there ripping off people with subprime loans,” Brooks said. “By me going down there, they will see somebody that it happened to.”
Mortgage brokers are in the cross-hairs of some of the measures in the Legislature’s response to fears that the subprime loan crisis will soon hit the state hard. As the housing market weakens across the country, the hardest hit have been borrowers of subprime loans, typically people who don’t meet the credit standards for a conventional loan. Many such loans automatically reset to higher rates after time, squeezing homeowners’ budgets.
Other bills aimed at the crisis call for more financial literacy and clearer language in foreclosure notices, seek full financial disclosure from lenders and boost protections against foreclosure scams.
The governor’s office expects the number of foreclosures to increase in the next year. Senate Democrats said foreclosures spiked 72 percent from November 2006 to November 2007.
Late last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire created the Task Force for Homeowner Security, which reported its findings to legislators during the first week of session.
Overall, Washington state has been able to fend off most of the negative effects of the mortgage loan crisis thanks to a relatively healthy economy, stable home prices and a low number of subprime loans with adjustable rates, the task force found.
Still, it issued 24 recommendations to curtail the effects of the downturn. Gregoire requested bills using the task force recommendations.
The Senate has already passed the first bill aimed at the impending crisis, a task force recommendation earmarking $1.5 million in emergency money for homeowner counseling. The measure is now in the House.
Another bill with the rest of the 23 recommendations — including requiring simple language in foreclosure notices, mandating notification of counseling options in foreclosure notices, and making mortgage loan crimes felonies — has been introduced with support from leadership of both chambers, and the Washington Association of Mortgage Brokers.
“We don’t want Washington to join the rest of the nation, facing the difficulties people are having in keeping their homes,” said Sen. Jean Berkey, D-Everett, who sponsored the bill.
More contentious are proposals targeting mortgage brokers that would require full disclosure on all points in a loan — such as possible fees and interest rates — in plain language, require brokers to act in good faith toward borrowers, and increase state oversight.
“Mortgage brokers are an unregulated group of people that sometimes prey on people’s lack of knowledge,” said Sen. Brian Weinstein, D-Mercer Island, who sponsored the good-faith bill.
The mortgage brokers oppose Weinstein’s bill, fearing it will open floodgates for lawsuits. But Weinstein thinks Gregoire’s bill does not go far enough in holding brokers responsible.
“We’re already serving our customers in a fashion that already represents a commitment to the customer,” said Dave Erickson, the association’s president.
Erickson also doesn’t buy the dire predictions, saying that the percentage of subprime loans in trouble in Washington is small compared to other states, and that property values are holding steady. Mortgage brokers, he said, are taking an unfair amount of the blame.
“There’s plenty of borrowers who say ‘I didn’t know, nobody told me,’ and yet you see their fingerprints all over the disclosures mandated by federal and state laws,” Erickson said.
At ACORN Housing, a national counseling firm for low-income homeowners, demand for counselors has increased so much that the organization created a new department for people in danger of losing their homes, said Susana Garcia, Washington state’s director.
“A lot of them don’t know what they got into,” Garcia said.
The number of mortgage brokers reapplying for licenses dropped by 34 percent this year after the State Department of Financial Institutions introduced tougher tests and background checks.
Brooks ran into trouble when he refinanced his home in Seattle’s Rainier Valley area in 1998. After being fired from Boeing, a divorce, and the opening of his barbershop, he was left in a financial bind and refinanced with a subprime loan to tap the equity in his home.
By 2002, he had filed for bankruptcy twice, and was falling into more debt after his monthly payments went from $1,400 to $2,900, something Brooks said this broker didn’t tell him would happen.
Brooks now lives in low-income housing in the Rainier Beach neighborhood.
He acknowledges that he didn’t know much about loans when he refinanced, but he expected his mortgage broker to look out for him.
“I’m a really hard worker,” Brooks said. “When you go out to refinance your life’s work, you’d think the broker would be there to help you.”
The bills
The homeowner counseling bill is SB 6272. The mortgage broker fiduciary bill is SB 6381, and the bill implementing the task force’s recommendations is HB 2770.
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