Mar 4, 2009
Distressed Mortgages in Need of Workouts
Lately, we’re seeming more and more stories describing investor groups, similar to this one:
Patricia Greenberg’s townhouse in Irvine, California, was losing about $10,000 a month in value when she received a letter in February 2008 that looked too good to be true: An investor was offering to cut her $472,000 mortgage by 26 percent and her monthly payment by a third.
“I didn’t want to get involved in a scam,” says Greenberg, a cosmetics saleswoman for Orlane Inc., who had bought the house with no money down eight months earlier.
It was no ruse. New York hedge fund manager Ralph DellaCamera Jr. says he’d purchased the mortgage for 60 cents on the dollar and forced the originator, MLSG Home Loans of Reno, Nevada, to eat the loss. Protecting his investment, DellaCamera lowered Greenberg’s debt to keep her in the home. She now pays $2,400 a month instead of $3,800 and plows some of her savings into upgrading the Cape Cod-style residence.
The mortgage area seems like it will be fertile ground for value investors. You have a great situation where the banks desperately need to get these toxic assets off of their balance sheet, so they’re motivated sellers. In addition, they may lack the ability to actually examine the loans, borrowers, and homes themselves to accurately peg the true value of these mortgages. Investors like DellaCamera are certainly interesting and will probably make a good deal of money — but I don’t think they’re going to be the solution to our housing problem. Simply because the number of houses far outnumbers the numbers of groups like DellaCamera’s.
