Foreclosures: Tales of Wells Fargo
If yesterday’s PD spread about exploding foreclosures gave you the feeling that Cuyahoga County has entered a subprime Twilight Zone — well, it gets weirder. Check out this chart of the county’s top ten 2005 home purchase mortgage lenders, courtesy of the Housing Research and Advocacy Center:
Who are these guys? Only two are established local banks (Third Federal and Fifth Third), and they account for less than a third of the loans on the chart.
The rest of the companies dominating the county’s home purchase lending in 2005 were those obscure “subprime lenders” we keep hearing about — names you’ve never heard unless you’ve borrowed money from them. Names like Argent, Countrywide, National City of Indiana.
And then there’s Wells Fargo.
Hey, fellow mature persons, remember “Tales of Wells Fargo”? Remember Dale Robertson as Jim Hardie escorting those stagecoaches through No Man’s Land, shooting it out with outlaws and Indians to get the passengers and cargo safely to their destinations?
Well, these days, Jim Hardie seems to have gotten out of the transportation security business and into foreclosures.
Wells Fargo and Company is now one of the nation’s biggest and baddest subprime lenders — big and bad enough to have its own ACORN campaign — and it’s a big player in Cuyahoga County’s foreclosure crisis, too. According to the County Auditor’s database, Wells Fargo subsidiaries hold title to more than 500 foreclosed properties in the county — over three hundred in the city of Cleveland alone, which seems to be more than any other lender — and have many more on the way. The company has filed 280 “sheriff’s deeds” with the County Recorder just in the last three months.
From the County Recorder’s database, here are Wells Fargo’s totals of mortgage and sheriff’s deed filings, by quarter, since the beginning of 2005:
Note that in the first two quarters of this year, Wells Fargo seems to have taken one Cuyahoga County home through sheriff’s sale for every two mortgages it originated.
In the last year of “Tales of Wells Fargo”’s five-year run, Jim Hardie bought a ranch and settled down. I don’t think they revealed whether he got his mortgage from his employer. But if he did, it might explain why he only got to stay on that ranch for a year.
July 5th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
There is a lender near the top of that list that generated almost 20 calls to me in February. Each call from a person who got taken by the predatory promises and then couldn’t keep up their payments and could not sell anywhere close to what they paid; all within the last 18 months. It was my most depressing month in real estate. But a heck of a lot more depressing for them. Your blog post was better than the PD article.
July 6th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Not that this has anything to do with foreclosures, but given the week I’ve had, I thought it appropriate to point out that Wells Fargo recently bought out my health insurance company as well.
-eldest daughter with spots