Is a 300% Mark-Up On Lender-Placed Insurance Justified?
April 30th, 2008
How many ways can a borrower get absolutely hit over the head with fees in the loan process? If you think about it, it is amazing how many fees are involved with the lending process. I mean you have fees such as the “document preparation fee;” the “email fee” (a fee some mortgage brokers will charge you to receive and print out an email); the oh-so-wonderful “admin fee;” the Yield Spread Premium (“YSP”); the Service Release Premium (“SRP”); and on and on and on. Unless you’re highly sophisticated in the loan industry, it is virtually impossible to know what is customary, normal, or reasonable.
What’s worse is that these fees do not stop at the origination phase. The abusiveness of fees in the loan process can even continue well into the servicing of your loan. Specifically, borrowers can get price-gouged in their impound accounts.
In basic terms, an “impound account” is a trust account established by the lender to hold the borrower’s money to pay for real estate taxes, and insurance premiums. These accounts are a measure that lenders take to mitigate the chance that a borrower will default on his loan. For instance, impound accounts assure the lender that the borrower’s property taxes are timely paid (to avoid liens) and that the borrower’s insurance is paid on time (to avoid uninsured loss.) Borrower’s are taught to view impound accounts as a good thing because the borrower does not have to worry about paying taxes or insurance himself because the lender “takes care of it.”
There’s the background, and here’s the rub. What the lender fails to mention when they purchase insurance on a borrower’s behalf via an impound account, is that they will opt to purchase an exorbitantly high priced insurance. In fact, as I have recently discovered (because it happened to me), the “lender-placed” insurance that the lender will purchase is about three times (3 times!) as expensive as the insurance the borrower can procure for himself! To make matters worse, unless the borrower is savvy concerning his real estate costs, he will never know that he is paying too much for his insurance. Unfortunately, the lender can make this excessive purchase without any forewarning and/or explanation to the unsuspecting borrower.
Certainly, every borrower would want to know if he is being assessed a fee more than three times the normal cost. Personally, I cannot think of the situation where I would willingly pay over a 300% markup to have someone purchase something for me. As a real estate attorney, I consider myself sophisticated concerning real estate issues. However, up and until last week, I had no idea how the lender-placed insurance system (or gimmick) works. When I caught on, I personally called my lender to inquire about this practice. I spoke with three representatives, including a supervisor, and was met with the typical “I don’t know” response. Interestingly, all representatives did openly admit to the fact that if the lender purchases the insurance on behalf of the borrower it will be about three times as much the price the borrower would pay if the borrower pays for it on his own.
I wonder how many teetering borrowers have been pushed into default as a result of this practice? Only the lenders would be able to tell us. As a legal practitioner, I view this lender-placed insurance practice as posing a huge risk to loan servicers for a nationwide class action. Maybe it will take a class action lawsuit to expose and stop this practice in the future. The bottom line is that this practice needs to stop. Not only is it highly unfair to the unsuspecting borrowers in the national mortgage marketplace, it exposes lenders and servicers to substantial liability.
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Attorney Jeffrey L. Hogue is a partner at the San Diego law firm of Hogue & Belong. Mr. Hogue is also a founder of the Mortgage Accountability Association.
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