SUBMITTED: Wednesday, October 08, 2008
POSTED: Wednesday, October 08, 2008
Fortunately this story had a happy ending. As a victim of this company myself, I've been following stories like this for years, and this is not always how things work out for many. I've come across a number of stories about this sort of predatory lending practice from NVR.
Ryan Homes targets first time buyers for most sales, which makes their tricks a little easier to pull off, but clearly, no matter who the buyer is, NVR/Ryan Homes is willing to use preditory tactics.
Most ironic in this case, Ryan Home advertises NVR mortgage is a better choice in part because they are more coordinated with their own builder, and are thus more cooperative and flexible when complications come up. The complaint here alleges that coordination may have intentionally created the problems. It seemed planned, not inadvertent.
What makes your story different, is the housing crunch probably saved you. During the boom, home builders saw the value of the homes they built go higher by the time they were completed. Sometimes they willingly pushed buyers out of deals with these same tactics, and they could and did legally keep the down payments, and still quickly sold the house to another buyer for it's higher appraised price.
They have frequently used the earnest money or down payment to force buyers into ridiculous rates, terrible ARMS, loads of unexpected junk fees at closing, and the buyer is really trapped, within a "take the deal or loose your $15,000 +" down payment.
Some buyers had to walk away, with no real recourse. While the market is tight, it may be less likely they would try to push a buyer from closing a deal, but banks are certainly squeezing every cent out of consumers they can get right now with near lawlessness, so one could only guess what tactics are being attempted.
While it's good you got resolution, it should not be forgotten, this company likely continues this type of what I consider to be predatory lending. I believe the practice played a hand in what caused the banking crisis. It's been a loosely regulated industry, as we all know, due to the bail out and banking crashes.
Until some regulation protects consumers from this method of scheming, there is not much to stop it from repeating. You got lucky. That isn't going to happen with everyone.
And yeah, their people will tell you should have read the contracts, and it's your fault if you signed a scam deal. But those are often the same people that just got $700,000,000,000 from taxpayers for not paying close attention to more obvious scams in their own dealings.