Negotiating with lenders is a very cumbersome and overwhelming experience, especially for someone who isn’t versed in mortgage lingo or doesn’t understand borrowers rights and the law. Most people don’t realize that a mortgage is a contractual agreement between a bank and a borrower. Being that it is a legal document it is important to know the details of the contract and what rights or restrictions are set forth in the agreement. Long before ANY negotiation all the facts and figures of a particular case need to be brought to the forefront. In doing so inevitably it I discovered that several basic consumer rights laws have often times been bypassed and overlooked due to an irrational and greedy banking industry. Many times this is the saving grace in getting the lender to “play ball”. The reason is simple – if it can be proven that mild or potentially severe consumer rights laws have been violated then the lender stands to lose a lot more then just a few months mortgage payments.
The step in the process which leads to finding these facts is called a forensic document audit. We do this via a full-time professional service called MFI-Miami. We use them because of their “best-in-breed” mentality about manually auditing mortgage loans front origination to post-closing. Many other firms choose to use an automated audit program on a computer and unfortunately this is just not an accurate system for finding violations. Many of the violations are of a emotional nature (i.e. lies, deceit, bait and switch, outright fraud) and a computer cannot read the human impact of these violations. Perhaps a program is good at finding interest rate (TIL) calculation errors but this just isn’t enough to coerce a lender into negotiations. Bottom line a computer cannot out-perform a trained professional in outlining the violations in a mortgage on behalf of a consumer.
Once this audit is complete we use the facts of the case as a bargaining chip with the lender to get terms that meet our clients needs. The cat and mouse game becomes more fair when the playing field is leveled and the tables get turned. After receiving our finalized document audit we begin negotiations to achieve maximum results on behalf on the client in order to persuade them to stay in the property with much better terms moving forward.
