From what I understand, which are a few hand gestures and the labels on Top Ramen, is that back in the late 90's the admin at that time saw a disparity regarding the numbers of MINORITY home buyers/owners.

The pres encouraged lenders to approvel loans with little or no downs and the balloon payments to follow.

The industry has been in free falll for the last 2.5 years. THe mortgage/title/bank industry are mostly to blame for this. They lent out tons of money and they were riding the horse to the river while everyone else walked.

In 99 I worked for a title company who had offices all across the So Cal. 35-40? It was a huge operation and the money was there.

The place where it went wrong was the greed and the lax rules that everyone operated by. The amount of money made, wasted and just thrown away was incredible.

A title/mortgage office would open up and the people running the office were given carte blanche to buy some of the silliest office supplies on the planet.

Why settle for plain BIC stick pens when you can order pens that are engraved with your name and phone?

I threw out about 50 thousand business cards all told.

At one office they had just delivered a 3,000 card order and the office closed a few days later!

Reps were stealing customer files and doing deals outside of the company's business.

Reps were quitting and stealing files when they moved on.

IT got to the point where a person was sent to a soon to be closed office, without warning, with a pair of bolt cutters and a note.The evening before the whole office data base would be run and saved at the main office, Then the 'Angel of Death would give the note to the office manager and go to the back room and cut the phone/computer lines to keep the people in the office from deleting files and taking them off site.

There was HUGE MONEY TO be made-people closed deals, made some serious green and said EFF IT!

Money was lent out to foreigners who spoke little or no English and sometimes had their teen agers who spoke better English than the parents would try to explaing what they were signing. There were other reports of people buying homes with no paperwork or any proof of income. Applications were submitted
and if they were denied, a new loan app would come back later in the day with 'new' info on the form.

That was the way it was. I worked for about 6 months total across the year closing escrow offices and had I been paying attention to what I was working with there would have been a chance to help people out keep their homes without screwing them and making honest money on the side.


What a shame that we have hit this low.