Mortgage Forum

Joel Fraser

I'm digging into a situation to help a neighbor out. The details are still fuzzy, but we need help immediately.My neighbor ran into financial hardship and went into foreclosure #1. Lucky for him this was in the subprime heyday and acquired a loan from a company named Aegis. Going into default again, his loan was sent to Ocwen Financial for collections. This is where I came in. He contacted me and inquired if I would be interested in purchasing his property. It is considered agricultural and I was looking to purchase some grazing ground at the moment anyway. I took on the task of digging through the mess. It took me a while to find the deed with Ocwen and set out to help him pay off the loan. This is where I ran into a bunch of problems. Ocwen would not talk to either of us, and a month passed before I would get a payoff quote from them. The day was set to January 19, 2007. Being a bit leary of sending out a check for $133,000 I tried to get a hold of Ocwen preceeding the due date to set up an exchange of papers. For the next 3 weeks I called 4-5 times a day trying to get a hold of someone and used their website out of desperation to set a new payoff day. I got it and the new day was Feb 22, 2007. Being a bit overwhelmed I used our lawyer to contact them and he had the same luck. It was 2 weeks later, same 4-5 calls a day, before I got a hold of the redemption office and explained that we were ready and needed them to chat with our lawyer. I got the run a round and was told they would get back to us. It was 3 weeks later that they did return a call and state they were working on it. This brings us to now. Yesterday he received a summons for eviction. We are at wits end and I have contacted Paiva & Associates for help. Please don't say it's too late, we've heard enough of that.I'm looking at a couple of issues with this whole ordeal. It's a MN law that anytime a loan changes hands, the borrower must be notified. This never happened.This is agriculture land, therefore we can exercise the Right of First Refusal according to our state Statutes.The original loan would have been covered by the Farmer-Lender Mediation Act and should have brought forth for mediation. The luck is that Aegis filed chapter 11 and I don't know if that is possible anymore.It just shows bad faith negotiating on Ocwen's part. We were/are ready and willing to pay off this loan and rid of the troubles.Any ideas?