DISQUS

Ron Scribner · 1 year ago

Just another example of proof that attorney's are dumb shites.

morganb · 1 year ago

the interesting question is what evidence do they have that makes them
confident enough to prosecute? i'd love to see what they've collected...

Jeff · 1 year ago

Ridiculous. As a former account executive I can say that Option One didn't charge different fees depending on race. The underwriting fee was the same for all borrowers. Option One approved or declined loans based on underwriting guidelines that didn't differ based on race, sex, religion, etc.

Loan officers are the ones who decided what upfront fees they were going to charge and what rate / yield spread they would submit the deal at.

At what point are borrowers going to be held responsible for their actions. They are the ones who signed the 1003s. They are the ones who wanted to cash-out the equity in their home to buy new a car, go on vacations, you name it. They are the ones who allowed someone to talk them into buying an "owner occupied" home that they never planned on living in.

While there were deals that should not have been done, this is a company that was around for more than 10 years and the loans performed well until the very end.

Greg · 1 year ago

Yes, as a former Option One AE I can say we did not discriminate. We did what everyone else in this business did which was screwed everyone over equally.

morganb · 1 year ago

Greg, classic. I think Massachusetts will have an incredibly difficult time
proving systemic, intentional discrimination across a huge organization such
as Option One.

StephenF · 1 year ago

Jeff...as a Mortgage Originator I tend to agree with your statement. The Banker/Broker was responsible for the charges to the client. My expirences with almost any Investor has been that their fees are consistent (and we complain that they are too high) I personally have not written a 2/28 or 3/27 and essentially turned all sub prime away that would not take a 30yr. I guess that could be construed as discrimatory huh...

Again, I think you post nails it...I would like to say this, and it may sound a bit "off color" but I would be willing to bet that if you investigated the loans that are crying foul in this case, you will find that more than a 50% were written by an ethnicity other then white. Point being, theose who are claiming discrimination were screwed by those they trusted more on ethnic similarities and not those who were infact offering good deals.
To some degree, people get what they deserve.

Greg...I would ask you to explain further. You seem convinced that Option One put a gun to every borrowers head and forced them to take the loan that they were offered. Please (if you have a moment) give me a few examples of the good all-in screwing.

frank · 1 year ago

This has been known for quite some time..subprime loans to minorities where they pay much more on average.

Jeff · 1 year ago

Option One did almost no advertising at all and what little was done was targeted towards brokers, not consumers. How was the company targeting minorities?

Yes, there were definately people who could have qualified for more favorable terms that ended up in a sub prime loan, but who's responsibility is that? At Option One we had only sub prime loans (except for a brief foray into ALT-A which was a joke). If a borrower was submitted to us and qualified based on our guidelines should they have been denied because maybe they would have qualified for a MyCommunity or FHA loan? How would we have known since we didn't run DU or LP? How would it have been viewed if we denied certain ethnic borrowers because we didn't think we were giving them the best deal. Nobody wants to hear their company's name mentioned by Jesse or Al.

I'm now a rep for a conventional / FHA lender so I know this is not a "sub prime" or Option One problem. Even good credit borrowers are put into loans with rates that are higher than they might actually be able to get. It might only be an 1/8th or 1/4 but it's still higher. Especially with regards to FHA loans. I've lost a number of loans because my company caps YSP at 3 and some of my competitors allow up to 4 and don't count UFMIP in the 4.99 calculation.

Option One was a very good company and operated with very high ethical standards. It's too bad everything is being blamed on "sub prime". If it was only a sub prime problem why are all of the MI companies running into problems? It's a mortgage problem, a housing bubble problem, a change in consumer behavior problem, etc. It just showed up first with sub prime loans.

Just my 2 cents.

Joe · 1 year ago

I'm not sure what the AG's beef is with Option One but having worked for H & R Block Mortgage in Mass from early 2001 til late 2003 as a loan officer. I can say that imo block definately took advantange of many of their tax clients and placed them in non-prime products when they clearly qualified for prime products. We had available to us Prime and FHA products thru Countrywide and non-prime products thru Option One. To the dismay of Corporate we in Massachusetts did a higher percentage of prime than any other location accross the country. This was due to the fact that most everyone working in Mass came from Prime backgrounds and most of the LO's in the rest of the country were from non-prime backgrounds.They would constantly emplore us to push non-prime since it was much more profitable and less labor intensive for them to do so. Also we as loan officers made more $ on prime since the payout was, at that time ,paying better than non-prime. To remedy this condition and what pushed me out the door was when they made two significant changes. 1. To restructure the payout plan and reduce the compensation on prime so that it was now more profitable for LO's to do non-prime. and the kicker, 2. To impliment a new policy that states that any borrower with a fico of 660 and below was to be placed in Option One products regardless of whether we had a DU approval or not. They informed us that this was the new RISK BASED PRICING model that the entire industry was moving towards. That to me is predatory lending. When I have one of my clients call me for financing and because they have a 658 fico and they qualify all day long for a Prime product that we offer but can't place them in because of a bull shit line about risk based pricing. Thats Corporate greed!

Below is the link to the AG's website and a 59 page PDF of the full complaint against H&R Block

http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=cagopressrelease&L=...