But your question about which lenders are responsible for all those sheriff’s sales to HUD is a good one. After all, what HUD (FHA) does is insure loans by private lenders — the lenders file the foreclosures, HUD just provides a guaranteed buyout covering their principal. So I just spent an hour looking up the foreclosing lenders behind last week’s 28 new HUD sheriff’s deeds. Here they are:

Citimortgage (Citibank) — 8
Leader Mortgage (US Bank) — 5
Wells Fargo — 4
National City (2 different mortgage subsidiaries) — 2
Chase Home Finance — 2
Mortgage Electronic Registration System — 2
Lasalle Bank, Midfirst Bank, Washington Mutual Bank, Ohio Savings — 1 each
Countrywide Mortgage as (get this) “substitute plaintiff for Bank of New York, as trustee for the certificateholders of the Reperforming Loan REMC Trust Certificates, Series 2003-R3″ — 1

Except for Ohio Savings (AmTrust), all these names including MERS are familiar subprime lenders.

As you said, the HUD sheriff’s deeds simply mean they “are transferring these homes back to HUD at times” — i.e. times when they’ve able to make their subprime mortgages FHA-insured. This implies that the deals met FHA underwriting standards, which should have provided a line of defense against mortgage brokers’ inflated appraisals, undocumented income and credit, etc. But did they? If HUD’s getting all these foreclosed properties from these same lenders, you have to wonder what kind of screening FHA has actually been doing.

The really critical part of this story, though, is the way HUD is getting rid of all their foreclosed houses, which were originally Federally insured in order to promote home ownership. As your example suggests, HUD is now pretty much dumping them off in bundles to “investors” — which makes the Federal government very much part of the problem.

I see you have Dept of HUD at the top of the list. When Tim and I went to the commissioner’s public hearing last year there was a man who represented HUD there. He said that if the mortgages are federally insured that many times the banks that take them back immediately transfer them to HUD. It is very hard to actually know when HUD takes back a home or if a bank has transferred the property to HUD. The man also said that often they are not aware that the property has been transferred back to them until they are dunned by the city for maintenance fees.

I am sure that in some areas the banks are transferring these homes back to HUD at times.

A friend of ours went to a foreclosure sale because the home next door to her was on the block. She spoke the the bank’s spokesperson who told her that they did not care whether the home sold or not because they would be able to transfer it to the Federal government because it was an FHA loan.

Do you know any of the details on this aspect of the whole strange goings on in Cuyahoga county.

Also I guess on Denison Avenue our first HUD auction on line sale has happened.

A landlord who has bought eight properties that way on the site. He intends to fix it up and go for section 8 status.