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Report: #549030

Complaint Review: Wells Fargo Bank, N. A. - Rockville Maryland

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  • Reported By: WH — Laurel Maryland United States of America
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  • Wells Fargo Bank, N. A. 6116 Executive Blvd Rockville, Maryland United States of America

Wells Fargo Bank, N. A. Premiere Asset Services (foreclosure warehouse) they act as the seller for Wells Fargo foreclosed properties. Try and buy a foreclosure, these people stall, lie and discourage you from helping this economy!!! We bailed them out with tax payer dollars and they want to hold onto these distressed homes!! Rockville, Maryland

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I am writing this letter in the hopes that someone can investigate these practices of mortgage companies and realtors.  I am available for interview and will do whatever I can to expose these people. 
Buying a home in the MD (near DC metro area) is not as easy as one would think, despite the national foreclosure crisis.  There are hundreds of thousands of homes on the market, right?  So shouldn't it be easy to buy one?  Dont the banks want to sell these homes?  My experience has caused me to question the intentions, not only of these banks, but of the realtors selling their products.

I am one of the lucky ones, or so I thought.  I am not one of the unfortunates who was duped by the creative financing schemes and I have NOT lost my job.  I am a federal government employee with good credit who hoped to benefit from the housing crisis AND do my part to help stimulate the economy by purchasing one of the many homes on the market.  My husband and I began searching for a home in May/June of 2009.  We looked at a lot of distressed homes with broken pipes, moldy basements, missing appliances and made what we thought were good offers on too many properties to count.  Our offers were usually outbid by investors who are snatching up most of the "good" foreclosure deals out there.  They will either flip them for an inflated price, or set them up as rentals, thereby bringing down the value of other homes in well-established neighborhoods (see New Carrollton, MD).  These investors have cash, a lot of it so quite naturally, the seller (in most cases, the bank) would prefer the cash deal over an FHA loan which usually requires the seller to make some improvements on the property and there are some other contingencies.  

The remainder of the houses on the market are being listed without clear titles and those that are short sales often dont make it into contract status.  Realtors will indicate that their seller needs to get third party approval (the owner of record, the bank, would have to approve the reduced sales price)  but these homeowners usually have no intention of selling the home at all; what they want to do is drive the price/value of the property down so that they will eventually be able to get the bank to refinance the property to them at the lower value cost.  All the while, the potential buyers, in this case, my husband and I, are left waiting 3 months for an answer from the bank.the homeowners then take the house off the market and negotiate with the bank to keep their home at the reduced price. We were victimized by this scam on one of the houses we wrote a contract on. 
Many realtors are actually saying that the properties they have can be closed within 30 days.  This is an outright lie and Id love the see the actual number of homes sold in this area, that from start (contract offer) to finish (closing), made it in 30 days. 

I worked with several realtors, who for one reason or another didnt deliver what they promised and we have written more than (8) eight contract offers and still aren't in a home.  In general, I found the realtors to have questionable business ethics, these folks are sales people and many of them very savvythey are careful not to tell an outright lie, but they will say anything to keep you in a deal, even if they KNOW the deal will never go through.  Youll also be interested to know that if you want to even write a contract on some of these listed properties, you need to pre-qualify with the realtors preferred lender?  I dont know what type of kick backs the realtors are getting, but if you want a particular home, many times you need to apply for a loan with the lender they choose BEFORE you can even write an offer!!!!  Oh, they say you dont have to get your financing through that lender, but they write into the contract that if you dont, you could have additional costs tacked on or assume the cost of specific closing fees i.e. title search, etc., to your loan.  Most people dont want the extra hassle so they just go with whatever lender the listing agent wants. 

In September we finally got one of our contract offers accepted  for a small home in Hyattsville, MD.  It had been on the market just 5 days.  In speaking to the neighbor, this house had been vacant for approximately (2) two years and had changed owners 2-3 times in the past 6 years.  She also cautioned me that another interested party was scared away due the house having some title issues.   Eventually, Wells Fargo foreclosed on this home and put it on the market with Weichert Realtors, without a clear title.  No worries, our apartment lease would not be up until December 31, 2009, surely they would have this all straightened out in 3 months.  I was already pre-qualified through Wells Fargo because I was strong armed into it prior to being able to write a contract offer on another home so I had already met the criteria to write a contract offer on this home.  

I had already been referred to a loan officer from Wells Fargo, Paul Denmon, who specialized in 203K FHA rehab loans.  We knew in looking at the property that it needed very little work to pass FHA, under $2000.00, but because the seller, also Wells Fargo, wanted to sell it as is, we needed to get an FHA rehab loan, approximately 1% higher than the regular FHA loan rate. Okay, the listing price was right, we needed to do very little work on the house, so we figured we would go for it and perhaps refinance in a couple of years.  We offered $10,000 more than the asking price and asked for 6% closing cost assistance from the seller, essentially, we were financing the closing costs by offering more, so we basically offered to give them, the bank, an additional $2,000 over the asking price when it was all said and done.

In terms of getting all of the required documentation for the bank i.e. the inspection, contractor quotes, you name it, I did most of the leg work and it was a huge undertaking.  It was a challenge from the start to get my loan officer to communicate with me.  He often did not answer his phone or respond to e-mails.  After finally getting the estimates for repairs and upgrades I needed, the loan officer sits on that information for almost three weeks without bothering to send it to the 'validation' team.  Who are they?  No one bothered to explain the particulars.  All of a sudden there are all of these extra players to include a Wells Fargo RENO team down in Florida who were almost always to blame whenever I had an issue with the processor and his services.  Soon it was November and I started to panic.no one seemed to know what is going on and Im looking at the very real possibility that I will be homeless in less than one month.  With a renovation loan, NONE of the work can begin until AFTER you close. 

These people casually took their time in processing my loan.  I was supposed to close in October and I kept telling these people that my lease in our apartment is up December 31, 2009.  They then began to demand last minute items requested by the underwriter, such as a second termite inspection for the ATTIC???!!!  They demanded documentation to support what they called Large Deposits, mostly in the $800 and 900 dollar range-->incidentally my husband's pay.  They made me go to my bank at a cost of $10.00 per transaction to explain similar deposits of checks which I had not copied before I cashed them.  It seemed like they knew they werent going to be able to close my loan in time, so they began try and set up a scenario in which I was the reason for the hold up.  When I had satisfied all their outrageous requests, they still could not guarantee to close our loan on the date they promised.  When I asked about their loan closing GUARANTEE, my inquiries were met with SILENCE.  Within the Wells Fargo mortgage team, they began to turn on each other, with no one accepting the blame.  

When I contacted their managers, they would assign blame to the sellers agent, also representing Wells Fargo.  They even went so far as to attack one another via email and argue about whose responsibility it was to let the appraiser into the property to complete a last minute inspection that the underwriter ordered..well, by that time the house had been winterized and the appraiser could not finish his work.  The listing agent even asked me, through my agent (so she says) to pay for the dewinterization!!!! I didnt tell him to turn the water off, in fact, I begged him to keep the water, the heat and the electric ON and I would pay the bills.just to avoid a situation like this, but no one seemed to be listening to what I wanted.  It took three weeks to get the water turned back on so the appraisal could be finished.
I would have walked away from this deal, but I was too far in and facing the end of my apartment lease.  Whats more, I had already paid for an inspection $275.00, two termite inspections $100.00, an appraisal $550.00 and countless man hours running around to gather documents, fax, phone call and email AND they had my Earnest Money Deposit of $1000.00.

I was supposed to close on my loan 12/23/09, yet I am sitting here typing this letter.  I agreed to an extension to January 12, 2010, provided the seller pay my husband and I $50.00 per day to cover our storage and hotel costs while we waited to close on the property.  The seller had the audacity to ask ME to pay them $50.00 per day for all of their delays!!!!!
I spent my Christmas and New Years holiday packing our belongings.  We aren't in our new house yet and I dont know if well even get the house because I have refused their offer to pay $50.00 per day while they take their sweet time finalizing our loan; we are walking away from this property.  The contract has expired and even though there is a statement in the loan contract that says that I would be assessed a $50.00 per day penalty if the delays in closing were due to my actions or inactions, they don't want to assume the same responsibility when the delays are due to their negligence. 

I wanted your readers to know that what President Obama has said about these bankers is  absolutely right.  We bailed out these banks with our taxpayer dollars yet they have NO gratitude.  Those houses in your communities...you know the ones with boarded up windows and little white peices of papers in the windows with the unmanicured lawn?  This is all the work of these banks.  Your communities are in ruin because of banks like Wells Fargo.   Whats more, those of us out here--potential buyers, are being discouraged from buying any of these foreclosed or short sale homes and these bankers and realtors need to be regulated more closely.  There are people profiting from this crisis, the realtors, the banks and the investors and thats all.
 

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 01/03/2010 06:46 AM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/wells-fargo-bank-n-a/rockville-maryland-/wells-fargo-bank-n-a-premiere-asset-services-foreclosure-warehouse-they-act-as-the-se-549030. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

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