To watch today’s video blog, please click on the link below:
Elliot S. Schlissel is a foreclosure defense attorney. He can be reached for consultation at 516-561-6645 or 718-350-2802.
Fixing Up Your Home for Sale
April 4, 2011 by
Do you want to sell your house? If the answer is yes, you may want to consider fixing it up to make it more sale worthy. It may be necessary to modernize or improve certain aspects of your home or to upgrade your property to make it more marketable in the over crowded real estate market.
How Much Should You Spend
The rule of thumb with regard to spending to make your home more marketable is to spend no more than one or two percent of your home’s value. There are various things you can do to make your home more marketable.
Kitchen Appliances
Your kitchen appliances should match each other (hopefully, this is not the first time you have heard this suggestion!). Attractive, stainless steel kitchen appliances or color coordinated kitchen appliances make the kitchen more presentable.
Landscaping
Real estate brokers talk about the concept of curb appeal. When a purchaser walks towards your home, do they like what they see? Your gardening should be neat and attractive. Shrubs should not be overgrown. Weeds should be removed from your lawn. Flowering shrubs, flowers and attractive pots also add to the curb appeal of your home. You may have to hire a gardener to obtain this look.
Painting
Homes with fresh coats of paint in their rooms have a cleaner, more attractive look. Stick to neutral colors, such as off whites or baige. Take a look at your moldings. Are they scratched or beaten up? Replacing or repairing and painting moldings adds a finishing touch to a room.
Storage Space
Perspective purchasers like to see organized storage areas. Make sure your closets and storage areas are neat and organized. Buyers will be looking into them! Closet systems can be an inexpensive upgrade.
Bathrooms
The grout around your toilets and your bathroom tiles should not be discolored, cracked, uneven, and there should be no missing grout. Beat up toilets and black grout have a negative impact on prospective purchasers. You don’t have to remodel your entire bathroom. Just fix it up and make it more attractive! If the shower head is dirty or rusty, replace it! Take a look at the light fixtures in your bathroom. Are they out of date, dirty or damaged? If so, upgrade and replace them with new, attractive light fixtures.
Selling Price
The minor upgrades, enhancements and fixing-up suggestions in this article may help you sell your home. However, in today’s market, one should be realistic as to what a home is worth. Your home is worth only what someone else will pay for it. Real estate values are based on numerous factors, including supply and demand. If you want more money than the market values your home at, you’re making a mistake. If you want to sell your home now, take the best reasonable offer! Do not be greedy!
Our office assists clients with mortgage modifications. We deal with mortgage modification programs that fail to meet our clients needs. We litigate defective foreclosure lawsuits, predatory lending issues, defective mortgages and bad faith by financial institutions. Our office has been involved in handling real estate matters for more than three decades. We also maintain a foreclosure blog. We advise our clients whether filing a Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcy is necessary to stop their foreclosure proceedings from moving forward. We assist our clients in stopping foreclosure and sometimes we can help eliminate second mortgages. If a bankruptcy is filed at the end of the bankruptcy, we can help our clients reestablish credit. Feel free to contact us for a free consultation.
Mortgage Modification Scams
March 24, 2011 by
There are companies advertising on the internet that they assist homeowners with mortgage modifications. Sometimes these companies are run by charlatans who are engaged in mortgage modification scams. These companies target the elderly, minority members, and individuals with bad credit.
Sometimes the mortgage scam companies request the mortgage holder to make their payments to them and not to their financial institution. They claim they will take care of the problem at their end. This is always a mistake. If you are going to pay your mortgage, pay it directly to your financial institution.
Another mortgage scam involves the submitting of an application to your mortgage company showing you have a higher income then you actually have. If you can’t afford the mortgage to begin with, you’ll not be able to make your mortgage payments. This will result in your home ending up in foreclosure. This is a route you should not start down.
Interest Only Mortgage Payments
Obtaining a mortgage that requires that you, for a period of time, only make interest payments is also not a wise choice. These type of loans sometimes have balloon payments. In a balloon payment situation, after a period of time you must make a lump sum payment or refinance. Under this type of scam the scammer will tell you that down the road things will be better and you’ll be able to refinance at a lower rate and obtain a better quality conventional mortgage. Don’t bet on it!
Mortgage Modification Attorneys
Under the appropriate circumstances, we assist clients in submitting mortgage modification applications. We also defend our clients in the event their homes go into foreclosure. We attend foreclosure court conferences on behalf of our clients. We litigate issues involving defective foreclosure lawsuits, bad faith on behalf of financial institutions, defective mortgages, predatory lending and other real estate related issues. We maintain a foreclosure blog which is updated regularly concerning various issues related to foreclosure, mortgage modification and real estate matters.
We review our client’s situations carefully and, when appropriate, we file either Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 bankruptcies on their behalf. Call us for a free consultation at 1-800-344-6431, 516-561-6645 or 718-350-2802.
Home Modification Problems in California (Part 1): Lawyers who Assist Homeowners in Mortgage Modifications Are Now Out of Reach
February 24, 2011 by
The Ridiculous Law in California
The State of California has more active foreclosure cases than any other state in the country. Homeowners in California who seek mortgage modifications have had difficulties for the past few years. Today, they have a new difficulty – they can no longer hire lawyers!
Lawyers throughout the State of California are now being forced to reject clients who come to them for the purpose of obtaining mortgage modification loans. This is because California has passed a unique, unusual and restrictive statute. The new law states that attorneys who work on mortgage modification loans can receive no payment until the loan is approved. Under the new statute, clients cannot even put retainer payments in attorney trust accounts.
This California statute is unlike any other statute in the country. The intent of the California statute is for “fly-by-night” loan modification businesses run by non lawyers to be eliminated from the marketplace. Unfortunately, there has been a fallout from this new statute. The unintended consequence of the new law is that honest, hard-working, well-known, well-established attorneys with excellent credentials can no longer represent individuals in dealing with financial institutions’ complicated and burdensome paperwork related to loan modifications.
New York Foreclosure Defense Lawyers
In the state of New York, there are no restrictions regarding the hiring of foreclosure defense attorneys. For more than 45 years, the Law Offices of Schlissel DeCorpo has been at the forefront of defending consumers and homeowners regarding litigation with financial institutions. We have developed an expertise in defending foreclosure lawsuits. Upon meeting with our attorneys, we will analyze the paperwork related to your case. We will discuss foreclosure defenses, mortgage modifications and the potential of using bankruptcy filings to assist you. We will provide you with a detailed explanation as to the foreclosure process, the mortgage modification process and how bankruptcies affect homeowners. If you are in trouble with your lender, or behind on your mortgage, call us. We can help you! Our phone numbers are 1-800-344-6431, 516-561-6645 and 718-350-2082.
Long Island Foreclosure Crisis
February 18, 2011 by
In 2010, Long Island was a hot bed of foreclosure activity. As a result of the foreclosed homes on the market, there is now an inventory of approximately three years of homes that need to be sold. Simply stated, if no new homes came on to the market to be sold on Long Island for a period of three years, considering the current amount of real estate sales, it would take this period to eliminate the backlog of homes in foreclosure already on the market to be sold.The only place in the United States that has more foreclosed homes on the real estate market is Miami, Florida. In November of 2010 there were 893 new foreclosure cases started in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island.The Home Affordable Modification Program (“HAMP”) that was created by the Federal Government to prevent home foreclosures will only assist 800,000 homeowners. When it’s taken into consideration that there are approximately four million foreclosure situations in the United States, less than one in four distressed homeowners will be receiving assistance.
Flawed Mortgage Foreclosure Programs
The current mortgage foreclosure programs rely on the financial institutions to agree to voluntarily reduce the homeowner’s monthly payments to an affordable level. The banks have not been cooperative in this endeavor. Instead of reducing the mortgage payment amount for homeowners, in more than 75% of the cases, the banks put the homes into foreclosure. When the banks take this action, they accelerate the mortgage, refuse to accept future mortgage payments, take the home back and put the house back into an overburdened real estate market.
New York Foreclosure Defense Attorney
Our office defends foreclosure cases in New York. We currently have dozens of successful foreclosure cases pending in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island, as well as in Westchester, Brooklyn and Queens Counties.
Our office represents our clients regarding mortgage modifications. We are experienced with regard to the problems mortgage modification programs have. We maintain a foreclosure blog to help educate our clients regarding the numerous issues concerning the current foreclosure crisis. If our clients are sued, we represent them in the foreclosure litigation. We attend foreclosure conferences on their behalf. We litigate defective foreclosure lawsuits, predatory lending practices, and failed mortgages. If you have a mortgage modification or foreclosure problem, we are the attorneys for you!
Blame the Banks, Not the Homeowners, for the Mortgage Crisis (PART 3)
February 4, 2011 by
Posted by Elliot S. Schlissel, Esq.
Modifications Are Superior to Foreclosures
The granting of mortgage modifications to worthy homeowners is a much better policy for the banks, the homeowners and the economy in the United States. However, the banks don’t get this! If the banks were to modify mortgages, in most situations, they would end up making more money, the homeowners would have a place for their family to live, the foreclosure volume in the United States would go down and real estate prices would start to rebound.
Foreclosures Have a Negative Impact on the Real Estate Market
The huge volume in foreclosures is having a crushing impact on the real estate market in the United States. Who is to blame for this mess? The banks and other financial institutions!!! They created the mortgage bubble by improper mortgage lending practices and they made the foreclosure crisis worse by failing to set up reasonable appropriately financed and managed mortgage modification programs. The Federal government bailed out the banks when they had financial problems. The banks were supposed to help the homeowners who were in financial trouble. They have failed miserably in this endeavor!
Foreclosure Defense and Loan Modification Lawyers
If you are involved in the above referenced foreclosure mess or have problems with mortgage modifications, we can help you. The foreclosure defense lawyers at the Law Offices of Schlissel DeCorpo have been assisting our clients for more than 45 years. We have dozens of foreclosure defense cases pending throughout the courts in the Metropolitan New York area. We attend foreclosure conferences for our clients. We help negotiate mortgage modifications. We are familiar with the mortgage modification programs that fail. We are adept at litigating defective foreclosure lawsuits, predatory lending and bad faith of financial institutions. Call us at 1-800-344-6431, 516-561-6645 or 718-350-2802. We can help you!
Blame the Banks, Not the Homeowners, for the Mortgage Crisis (PART 2)
February 2, 2011 by
Fraudulent Mortgage Applications
Banks were aware that the applications that had been submitted to them by individuals seeking mortgages were fraudulent. Instead of operating an appropriate underwriting process that provided due diligence to see to it that the consumer’s requesting mortgage loans could actually make payments on these loans, the banks simply stopped underwriting the loans in any reasonable manner. The failure of the banks to properly underwrite the loans is one of the principal reasons for the mortgage bubble in America.
Income-to-debt Ratio
The banks have been aware for decades that there is an income-to-debt ratio a perspective homeowner must meet to be able to afford to make mortgage payments. Loan officers, mortgage brokers, real estate agents and appraisers were involved in the submission of fraudulent documents where the loan-to-debt ratio was of such a nature that the perspective homeowner could never successfully make the mortgage payments.
Servicing Companies Who Would Rather Foreclose than Modify Mortgages
The servicing companies hired by financial institutions to service mortgages were supposed to provide the consumer with a simple, reasonable mortgage modification process. Instead, incompetent under-financed mortgage modification programs were set up. The financial institutions continuously ask the consumers to send and resend the same documents. The communication level between the mortgage servicing companies and the consumer is almost non-existent. Consumers became more and more frustrated in trying to communicate with individuals at the serving companies who knew nothing about their pending mortgage applications. Instead of appropriately processing mortgage modifications for creditworthy individuals, these individuals have been turned down for their mortgage modifications.
Twenty Years of Representing New Yorkers in Foreclosure Defense Lawsuits
Our law firm is currently handling dozens of foreclosure defense cases throughout the Metropolitan New York area. We help our clients obtain mortgage modifications. We prevent banks from forcing our clients out of their homes. We attend court foreclosure conferences, litigate defective foreclosure lawsuits, predatory lending, bad faith and other improper practices by financial institutions.
Should you need help, we are the law in the Metropolitan New York area with an extremely high success rate in our foreclosure defense cases. Call us at 1-800-344-6431, 516-561-6645 or 718-350-2802.
Defense of Incompetency in Foreclosure Lawsuits
December 29, 2010 by
JP Morgan Chase sued Mr. & Mrs. Haedrich in a foreclosure proceeding in Nassau County, New York. Judge Phelan was the Supreme Court judge assigned to the case.
A guardian was appointed for the Haedrichs. The guardian moved to vacate judgments of foreclosure, as well as the mortgage and notes. The guardian alleged that Mr. & Mrs. Haedrich executed the mortgages and notes accompanying said mortgages in 1999, when they were incompetent. He claimed they suffered from a mentally debilitating condition, including dementia, which deprived them of their ability to make a reasoned intelligent decision concerning the execution of the note and mortgage.
Homeowners Competent to Enter Into Mortgage
The court held that the evidence presented did not sufficiently show that Mr. and Mrs. Haedrich were incompetent at the time of the execution of the mortgage and note. The court also held that the lender was not on notice and did not have any knowledge as to any aspect of their incapacity. The court held that the record did not present appropriate medical evidence showing the Haedrichs were rendered legally incompetent due to mental illness or for other reasons when they executed the necessary documents related to the note and mortgage at the real estate closing. The application by the guardian on behalf of the Haendrichs was dismissed.
About Our Firm
For more than 45 years, our law office has represented individuals in lawsuits involving creditors. We handle foreclosure defense proceedings throughout the New York Metropolitan area. We have a high degree of success in fighting off foreclosure lawsuits.
Should you or a loved one have questions or problems concerning a foreclosure lawsuit, please contact us at 1-800-344-6431 or 718-350-2802.
