Foreclosure Mess Will Take Years To Clean Up

Borrowers, lenders, investors face years of red tape, legal challenges

How long will it take before the American nightmare of home foreclosures is over? Ask Mike Dillon, who’s been fighting to keep his New Hampshire home for most of the past decade.

Though he missed two payments in 2002, Dillon then caught up and was current on his loan by later that year, he said. That’s when his mortgage problems began.

After the company servicing his mortgage failed to properly credit monthly payments to his account, it placed the loan in default. As he worked to straighten out the bookkeeping, with canceled checks in hand, the servicer began adding additional fees for property inspections, insurance and other charges.

In 2005, a New Hampshire judge agreed that the servicer’s “sleight of accounting resulted in improper assessments” against Dillon and, citing a “predatory scheme of penalties,” barred the foreclosure and ordered that the loan be reinstated without penalties as of August 2005.

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