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Wellington Florida Real Estate News: Mortgage Fraud Comes To Wellington

Wellington Florida Real Estate News: Mortgage Fraud Comes To Wellington Florida.

We get asked quite often why the prices have dropped so dramatically in Versailles of Wellington Florida. Versailles in Wellington Florida was built right at the height of the boom and right before the bubble burst.

The homes are stunningly beautiful in old French Provincial themes and the most extravagant entrance probably in all of Wellington. The entrance alone cost the developer millions of dollars. This is a gated community with a resort style clubhouse and pool. You can read more about Versailles Wellington Homes For Sale on this post that I wrote.

Versailles Wellington Florida homes for sale

By the time the building started you could not touch the smallest home in Versailles for under $600,000 with many of the homes selling between 1 million to 3 million dollars at that time. This attracted wannabe investors who were planning to flip these properties before the completion of the building. So what would happen is the buyer would go to the sales office, pick out their lot and their model to get built, then put down a very small deposit, usually about $10,000 To $15,000. The buyer did not have to go through the loan process until the end of construction. Some people bought two or more of these properties this way. Then the bust came and these buyers were stuck with having to close on the loans since they could not flip them during escrow because the values started to decline. Some people leased their properties and many just walked away and let them get foreclosed which drives the prices lower still.

versailles Wellington Florida homes for sale

A federal grand jury just indicted 8 South Florida licensed mortgage brokers, title agents and straw buyers. These people have all been indicted for committing fraud on buying five homes in Versailles of Wellington.

The indictment consists of 15 counts. The indictment alleges that these people flipped these 5 properties sometimes TWICE in the same day!!! And doubling the value of the property in ONE DAY! The group recruited buyers who did not have to bring any money to closing, took title to the property and then 24 hours later transferred the title. For doing this they each were paid $10,000.

Then when the second buyer took title to the property 24 hours later they were getting $437,000 of the mortgage money from Washington Mutual, WAMU. Then they walked away from all of these homes and allowed those homes to go into foreclosure and committing fraud against WAMU to the amount of $8.5 million dollars.

Please remember that all people accused of a crime have the right to defense and are innocent until proven guilty. The following names are in the indictment, a matter of public record and reported also in the local newspapers:

Most of the defendants are from Miami Florida and some also from Columbia, Rony Alberto Aguilar, Reinaldo Perez-Sanchez, Pablo Atouro Aponte-Torres from Puerto Rico, Fabio Salazar, Roger Omar Nunez- Murillo, Idalmis Arias, Ericson Perez of Georgia and Juan Carlos Lopez of Miami.

You can get a really good price on a magnificent mini mansion in Versailles Wellington Florida! Their loss is your gain!

versailles Wellington Florida homes for sale

T o view Florida Short Sales- Click here . We know Palm Beach County Short Sales and Port St Lucie Florida Short Sales and will help you get your home Sold if you need to Sell your home and help you buy your home in Palm Beach County Florida : Call us today.

Posted by Nestor & Katerina Gasset Realtors® Wellington Florida Luxury Homes on 11/13/2009 12:19 AM

Comments (31)

Mortgage Fraud and Forclosures in the ActiveRain Channel

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Originally posted at: South Florida Real Estate and...: Wellington Florida Real Estate News: Mortgage Fraud Comes To Wellington

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31 Comments on Wellington Florida Real Estate News: Mortgage Fraud Comes To Wellington

NOV

Hi Katerina...sounds like an awesome time for Fussy Florida home buyers, I like your search tool, I tried $25,000 Nothing yet :O))

Katerina -

Florida, Oregon; big houses, little houses - it doesn't matter. Such fraud at the bottom eschelon of the market happened all over the country.

Then there is the even greater fraud....at the highest levels of the mortagage/investment world. The big guys make even these high-dollar crooks in Wellington seem penny ante.

We had a similiar scheme here where arrests were made and those accused are now serving hard time. There is a high end community in Murrieta, just to the South - I believe it is Bear Creek and entire blocks of homes were foreclosed on.

This is an example of what I've been saying for over a year. The problem is not the consumer who got the loan that they couldn't repay. The problem was and has always been the professionals in the business who approved the loans when they knew the buyer didn't qualify.

What builder would construct luxury homes with a $10K deposit??? GEEZ. In my area, a builder doesn't even apply for a building permit until the buyer's loan is approved.

Clearly these builders/lenders/straw buyers were engaging in fraud. Glad to see the long arm of the law is finally getting to them before they figure out some other way of lining their pockets.

I almost typed "unbelievable.." but then again, I can believe it.

I live on the west coast of Florida and there are some strange happenings as well...what a beautiful community...congrats on the feature

Only 8 people? What a joke. I can probably name 8 that I know of that engaged in this horrendous conduct that we're all paying for now. Eight is nothing. For South Florida, it should be something more like 800.

When will the presidents and CEOs of these mortgage companies be charged for their culpability in the 'meltdown'? The answer: probably never.

Scott Miller, Realty Associates, Boca Raton, FL

As you know, it is all over Florida, prices were up up up. They have many mortgage professionals and investors in the Tampa area under investigation. What kills me, just kills me are the many innocent families that are and have been destroyed by the activities of the corrupt. That's why I do short sales, trying to save one family at a time. It breaks my heart.

Wow. Your numbers are high when compared to my Frisco TX areas. But these are magnificent homes. It's just so mind boggling how prices fluctuate like that. It does happen to my areas also, but in tens of thousands (which is significant) for the area.

Hey that one there seems to have one of them cement pond things or either a really large water leak. (LOL) Well, if they are guilty, then I suggest they do go to jail for taking advantage of the system for their own financial gain.

Todd Clark - www.LivingBeaverton.com

This scheme was rampart in the S&L cri8sis in the late 1980's. I am glad they got caught.

I believe that mortgage fraud is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to the decline of our real estate markets. But it's an important piece that needs to be weeded out and I agree with Scott Miller that many more indictments should follow. It would be interesting to see what happens to these people if they are in fact found guilty (slap on the wrist or book thrown at them).

-Scott

Scott Miller- Oh, a lot more than 8 people have been arrested in the last 2 years and there are many more ongoing investigations. But this is a sampling of what happened in just this one community of 400 homes. Out of these 400 homes, only about 1/4 of them were bought by real folks who wanted to make a nice life in this fabulous area. Wellington has its share of fraud and we get a lot of calls asking what is wrong with that neighborhood- why are the prices so much lower than when people bought the homes. We love that area, it is beautiful and one day it will be populated by residents who take pride in this awesome area.

I write a lot of posts whenever we get the news of the mortgage fraud or any real estate fraud here in our area of south Florida. Miami is so filled with fraud that most title underwriters won't even issue title there but that has been going on there for years and years. Remember the swamp land deals?

Fred- not in your life time, LOL!

Dave- There is always fraud in all areas of markets. It is the investigating and knowing that you are going to be punished when you get caught that needs to be spoken loud and clear.

John- The sad thing is that these are gorgeous neighborhoods in communities and the few people that actually bought a home there to really live in are the ones who get hurt. After all, the state made the documentary tax money on the sales, the town of Wellington and the county benefited from the first taxes collected at closing but the residents who live there all lost their shirts. But it is building back up.

Kris- yep, I can believe it to. I would never have the nerve to do something like that and since it is not ethical or legal I would not participate.

Tim- What I really was surprised is the cases where it was happening after the melt down. How did anyone even believe that the prices were going up when they were going down? That was blatant fraud with even the big players out in front.

Dick and Dixie- That is one of the reason we do short sales also. There are innocent people who just wanted to buy a home. Then there are those who wanted to game the system and then there were those who wanted to live in million dollar homes who make 30K a year and were able to get into a house they should never have been able to buy and that they could not even afford the upkeep on. Then there were all those flippers. People who wanted to make a living flipping houses. They got caught when the bubble burst. I don't feel sorry for them. They took the risk and lost, that is the risk you take. But we never sold one of those people the house! I can sleep at night!

Loreena- Yes, you need to move here and become our buyers agent:) We have many communities with this price range!

This is why the fed is so involved with changing our rules and regs. They just need to proscecute all the schmucks....not just a few. Get em outta the business forever and let the good guys remain.

Todd- Yep, if they are guilty- well- I don't believe in crowding our jails and prisons with non violent crimes- I think that all people that are convicted of fraud and those kinds of crimes should be made to do work for the communities. They are the ones that should be spending all those hours serving the people they hurt. The way it is set up now, they hurt innocent people financially then they hurt those people even more because those people now have to pay for their stay in jail and the court system. We need those people to be mowing everyone else's lawns and building the roads, cleaning the streets, oh, I can think of a big list that the government pays companies to do that they only need to enlist the prisoners to do. We are starting to do that here in Florida.

Larry, Lenn, Jim, Scott Loper-

Of course this crime is still a crime and therefore needs to be prosecuted. But it baffles me how fast we all turn on these criminals, how the attention is turned to the Bernie Madoff's and the like and yet the biggest fraud ever perpetuated on the American People goes unpunished and is not ever allowed to even be looked into- the Banks and the FEDERAL RESERVE!

I have a post I am drafting about the complete takeover of our financial system and free markets by the FED reserve board and how the banks have gotten away with the biggest kidnapping ever in history! What a joke! And no one did anything about it. It was the biggest scam ever with their stupid derivatives! Ron Paul presented a bill to audit the FED- of course, they told him to go take a hike. They said they would NEVER EVER let us see their secret society behind those walls.

Katerina

It would probably be mind boggling to know the real statistics and how much of that went on everywhere.

Ted- wait til you read the stats I found out about the ones that perpetrated this and opened it up to be able to have this fraud be so abundant. I am sure it is A LOT!

What a great idea, Katerina, to put a searchable database into your post. You are so techy.

We've had a ton of those types of mortgage fraud in Sacramento. Often I find it when I search in the archives on an REO to find out what happened to some of those homes. It's pretty clear to me when I see a small-time mortgage rep was the listing and selling agent, and that the property was never occupied yet resold immediately, prior to foreclosure.

Elizabeth- I would think that in California with the tighter laws that this would be harder to accomplish but then again, I am no longer surprised since that huge loan mod scam in CA where the principles and Pres are all attorneys, over 8000 complaints of then taking money from homeowners and not doing the loan mod processing, these same attorneys owned subprime mortgage companies and made 33 billion $! That was not enough, they then changed their company to this loan mod scam and these guys are not disbarred from CA BAR????

I would also like to see us ship people who are in this country illegally and commit a crime if it is cheaper, send them back to their home country and pay them to $20,000 per year to house them their. Probably saves us $20,000,000 by doing that it will be their home countries problem if they break out. Personally the argument that it isn't human to send these people back to their home countries because of their prison system is exactly why some come here to commit the crimes in the first place.

Todd Clark - www.LivingBeaverton.com

Todd- For many people prison life is great- they get free health care, 3 square meals a day, fitness program, library program, bible study and many other things that many people outside of prison don't get. Don't take my comment the wrong way- I know many innocent and low crime cases and how bad the prisons are even here for people who got the rotten end of the system. But it certainly is better than the prisons in other countries! That is a great idea, BTW. You don't have the right to come to any country to commit crimes.

The Spanish newspapers here are having a field day talking about these guys as they are all Spanish in this one ring, and most of them are Columbians. We were just reading some of the Spanish newspapers about what they think of these scumbags. They are not tolerant at all. The Spanish people here are so mad at them for doing this because it reflects on the rest of their community here.

Stuff like that makes me sick. What a beautiful community of executive-luxury style homes and I am sure many "normal, real" buyers got caught in the crosshairs with severely declining assets!! We had one of these fraud rings going on that involved over 200 homes. The girl arrested (again innocent until proven guilty) was listed in the 30 under 30 for Realtor mag. SAD!

Renee- Really??? A Realtor was implicated? That is sad! I don't know of any agents that were arrested. Many of those that did this were not agents but people selling real estate without a license, which is a felony in Florida.

Katerina... Sorry this happened, but know how you feel. We in Georgia, particularly in certain zip codes around Atlanta and Decatur, led the nation in Mortgage fraud for quite some time during the boom years. And there were mortgage providers, attorneys, builders, developers, buyers, appraisers, and Realtors involved. Unfortunately there were also a number of innocent people who were "used" in the various scams. Pretty sad, but widespread!

Katerina, I've been waiting for the 'perp' walks. Flips like these involve both agents, the mortgage broker, the appraiser, and the buyer and seller. Some of those parties knew they were defrauding, others went along, and still others thought it was just something that was done 'all the time'.

But when you see a contract price pumped $65,000 more than list, and then you see closing costs for the same $65,000 fed back to the buyer from the seller, even a newbie like me can read 'FRAUD' in capital letters. The contract I ran across in the files of my new brokerage at the time (no longer with them) didn't close. But how many of those deals did go through? And now we're in the mess we're in.

What a shame! I hope they nail their asses to the wall. On the other hand, some genuine buyers can now take advantage of the good deals.

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