From Pine View Farm

Are You Being Served? 1

Looking for an investment? Here’s a growth industry:

About a year ago, business from foreclosures started to pick up. In the last two or three months, it has become a deluge.

Last month, 7,499 foreclosure actions were filed in Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone.

(Via McClatchy.)

You get to meet nice people like this lady:

All Joanne Keeley wanted to do was help her grandson buy a used car, but she ended up with an expensive mortgage she couldn’t afford.

Walter Sellers, who arranged financing for the car, was moonlighting as a mortgage salesman and dangled a $1,220 monthly payment in front of her until the night before closing last May, she said, when he told her it would really be $1,790.

“He floored me,” she said. It got even worse the next day at closing, when she learned that the $1,790 payment did not include taxes and insurance, which amount to $310 a month.

“I guess if it had been $1,790, I wouldn’t have” applied for the loan, Keeley said recently at her dining room table in Aston, Delaware County, with her 6-year-old granddaughter at her side.

Sellers, who said he could not remember Keeley, declined to comment on her situation.

Why didn’t she run? Read a little further into the story:

“I trusted this man so much. He seemed like my friend,” Keeley said of Sellers, recalling how he sat at her dining room table last April to gather information for the application.

(snip)

“People who are in the business of bait-and-switch marketing know what they are doing,” Ackelsberg said. “They wait to change the terms until the transaction has progressed to a point where they know that it will be nearly impossible, psychologically, for the consumer to say no.”

Meanwhile, back on the preserve

Countrywide Financial’s chief executive and president will receive a combined $19 million in stock next week as part of the company’s pending takeover by Bank of America, according to a regulatory filing.

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1 comment

  1. Opie

    March 30, 2008 at 10:08 am

    I heard rich Democrats are buying the foreclosures and refinancing them to the poor folk who were kicked out… and at fair and affordable interest rates.