FAQ’s

©Copyright 2006   Certus LD LLC.

Reproduction in any form without written authorization is prohibited

Frequently Asked Questions

 

About borrowerHelp and Certus LD

Q. Who operates borrowerhelp.com?

A. The current website is a product of Certus LD, a company formed in 2004 by W. Craig Kenney and Dave R. Mortensen. You’ll notice there are no advertisements and the links we’ve provided to other resources are not based on a financial relationship or promotional fee.

Q. What is Certus LD?

A. Certus is an intellectual property management company focused on developing programs designed to reduce the enormous legal burden imposed on consumers and companies when disputes boil over into lawsuits. Our message to the industry when we began in 2004 was that any consumer litigation is a clear sign of an internal process failure. Someone didn’t handle something correctly if an individual went to the extreme of finding and paying an attorney to file suit. The full company name is Certus Litus Declino, which is translatable from Latin as “settled without litigation.”

Q. Who is Craig Kenney?

A. Craig is a semi-retired businessman who became a consumer advocate after a long and very public battle with Fairbanks Capital.  He lives outside of Baltimore, Maryland in a home he has rebuilt after an arson-caused fire in 2002. Craig maintains contacts with and consults key personnel at Select Portfolio Servicing and uses those contacts to help SPS borrowers and the company avoid litigation.

Q. Who is Dave Mortensen?

A. Dave, a former sales executive, corporate trainer and free-lance writer was recruited in 2003 while engaged in his own mortgage-servicer battle. His role is to lay the research groundwork for Certus LD and oversee the development of the company’s services and products. His title is “Director of Program Development.” Much of what you read and see went across his desk or through his computer at one time or another. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

Q. Can borrowerHelp stop a foreclosure?

A. If the situation has gone on for that long, the real answer is probably not, but everything depends on the circumstances. If a foreclosure is imminent, you really need to have a local attorney explain your options. If mistakes were made along the way or someone acted inappropriately, contacting us may result in another executive-level review.

Q. What do you charge to help a borrower?

A. We don’t. But because we see a disaster looming in the sub-prime market and cannot possibly hope to intervene in the thousands of situations that are coming, the model that has emerged is to fund what as been a no-charge, no-profit operation into an expanded business funded through the sale of educational products and services. Theoretically, over time it, having educated consumers will eliminate the need for a full-time business of intervening with servicers on behalf of borrowers.

Q. Is what I tell you confidential?

A. Yes. The fastest way to destroy a workable relationship that has helped numerous borrowers over the years would be to violate the trust of any of the parties involved. Remember the objective is to avoid letting a situation get to the point where people think there has to be a lawsuit. This also makes it impossible to publicize any of the results, but that’s the legal environment we have to live with.

Q. Why the relationship with SPS?  And what benefit do they get from working with borrowerHelp?

A. SPS is not the same company we were faced with years ago and came to a settlement with. The company actually responsible for settling the matter (PMI) is no longer an owner. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of the same people there any more. And the score shown on the site page isn’t something we crafted to make SPS look good. The scores are what comes out of the formula. We believe SPS realizes that litigation is unnecessarily expensive and the regulatory climate they operate in as well as their new ownership has changed their business model.

Q. What about other servicers?

A. borrowerHelp.com really has no formal relationship with other mortgage servicers, although that may change in the future, and our approach is to have their borrowers utilize the Mortgage Survival Kit to learn how to gain control of the situation before problems become serious. If enough people adopt the processes and methodology, an opportunistic servicer will eventually find their cost of handling and responding (as required by law) will exceed any gains they might be attempting to obtain by allowing borrowers to be taken advantage of.

 

 

 

About content on the borrowerHelp.com web site

Q. On the servicer pages, you suggest to not talk to the servicer when you start having problems, but we keep hearing from the lenders that if we would just talk to them sooner they may be able to help. What’s the real story?

A. So much of what winds up appearing in the media comes from non-sub-prime lenders and originators who may even service their own loans. They can do things most servicers cannot. Our focus is and has been on sub-prime servicers, most of which have no ability to make any alteration to the loans they service. In far too many cases, calling and talking to a sub-prime servicer about your financial problems, especially with an aggressive or opportunistic one, simply identifies you as the target. As we point out in the Mortgage Survival Kit, you have to act on your own behalf early on in the process and devise a strategy for getting down off the mountain safely.

Q. How is the Consumer Alert Score calculated and what does it mean?

A. Much as the credit bureaus collect information about consumers, we have been gathering and tracking data about mortgage servicers and have derived a proprietary formula to generate a score for them. Some of the key factors involved are their propensity to be involved in consumer litigation and complaints that have been filed. The size of the servicer’s portfolio and performance trends are also taken into consideration. In general, the higher the score the more likely it is that a consumer will experience difficulties with the servicer and the more difficult it will be to resolve them.

Q. Why isn’t there a forum on the site?

A. While forums seem to provide a venue to compare stories and provide information, without constant moderation it’s far too easy to turn attention away from the real objectives the originators had in mind.

Q. Will you have a news page?

A. It’s being considered, but as our Director of Program Development (Dave) points out, we don’t want to be in charge of the “Department of Redundancy Department,” and there are dozens if not hundreds of news sources on the Internet already.

If we do a news page, it will probably be something that involves things that aren’t being covered elsewhere.

 

 

About the Mortgage Survival Kit

Q. Why a book and why do you charge for it?  Why not just put it out on the Internet for free?

A. The reality is not everyone has Internet access, or they don’t have the time to spend sitting in front of a computer, while a printed book is readable by anyone, anywhere at any time. (You’d be surprised how many people have contacted us through someone else’s computer or one at work or a library.) Thus even though you can read the downloadable version with Adobe Acrobat Reader^®, it’s set up to be printed out in double-sided book format. The printed, bound version will be available in a matter of weeks but it obviously costs more to print and ship.

We charge for it in part because so much has been invested in researching and preparing it. The Mortgage Servicing Kit is a product of not only years of experience but at least a year in research and development effort. Add to that hundreds of man-hours of writing, designing and editing and the product becomes much more than the typical “free advice” that abounds on the Internet. And again, what’s out there isn’t keeping people out of trouble. A new approach is required.

Q. Who is the kit for?

A. Borrowers or those who are considering becoming borrowers. Even prime borrowers need to be aware of what can happen if their lender/servicer fails and their portfolio winds up in the hands of a predatory servicer.

Q. Is the downloaded version the same as what comes in the hardcopy?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you claiming using the Mortgage Survival Kit will prevent a servicer from preying on a borrower?

A. Claiming, yes, guaranteeing no. The fact is servicers use more technology than ever before to try and predict the behavior of a loan portfolio as well as warn them of impending trouble with a loan. What that means is the way they make decisions on handling loans is driven more and more by their computer systems. The Mortgage Survival Kit equips a borrower to not only avoid becoming a target, but shows how to respond when these imperfect analytical systems draw them into the net or the servicer bends the rules to create artificial opportunities.

Q. Have the mortgage servicers had any input on the Mortgage Survival Kit?  Did they approve it?

A. No and no. The Mortgage Survival Kit will be something of a shock to some of them. But there’s two sides to the story. It equips borrowers to deal with issues in a way that makes abusive servicing more costly than it ever has been, but it will also reduce some of their delinquencies at a time when foreclosures are heading into catastrophic levels in some parts of the country.

Certus LD Headquarters, near Baltimore, Maryland