Consumer complaint received 2018-07-08
Product: Mortgage — Conventional home mortgage
Issue: Struggling to pay mortgage — 
Company: Onity Group Inc. (FL)

I have been trying to get my mortgage company Ocwen to work with me to resolve late payments on my home loan for the last few years. This has proved next to impossible as they are constantly losing my paperwork, transferring me from one department to the next, and often assigning me to agents from a foreign country who speak little to no English. We have owned our home for 18 years and my wife and I both work full time and have the means to fix this mess but we continue to get the runaround from Ocwen. Late last year we were FINALLY approved for a trial program. We made the first two payments as agreed, but Ocwen received the third payment ONE DAY LATE. As a result, our modification was terminated and we were kicked back to the curb and back into foreclosure. We have tried repeatedly since then to fix this problem with Ocwen and to get them to conduct a new review. We have been assigned a contact person at Ocwen, but despite numerous attempts to speak with them have never been able to reach them and never gotten a call back. Our financial circumstances have changed and we deserve the chance to fix this problem. There are significant issues with this loan based on misrepresentations and improprieties at the time of origination by the agents from XXXX ( bad actor from subprime crisis ) who put us into a loan we did not understand and manipulated the application so that we would qualify. We were not aware of how quickly and how high the rate and payment would go on this adjustable loan and this ended up being a big problem for us. 

When we entered into this loan the rate was low and affordable. However, in a matter of a couple of years the rate and payment began to drastically increase and this coincided with the great recession. At that time I had a used car sales lot and repair shop and was making a solid living. The recession hit my business hard and over the next two years I struggled financially until the business was eventually shut down. At that time we immediately began reaching out to our lender to try and fix this problem ( XXXX was out of business ) and began a slow and excruciating dance. Paperwork would be submitted, three, four or five times, often the exact same documents. Paperwork would get lost or misplaced or we would need to continue to supply more documents, oftentimes documents we had already supplied. We made hundreds of phone calls to the Ocwen loss mitigation department trying to lock down some type of review and get a modification offer so we could try and resolve our delinquent payments. In many instances we dealt with agents from a foreign country who were difficult to understand. Other times we would be told we had a dedicated contact who would work with us but it was impossible to get this person on the phone. 

After years of fighting and going back and forth we were in a very solid place financially -- -I work as a XXXX at my XXXX XXXX XXXX and my wife works as a XXXX XXXX. Although our homes value has dropped significantly it is still our home and we want to keep it. We were very encouraged when we were offered a modification last year, and then crushed when our payment got to Ocwen one day late and our entire process was shut down. Ocwen needs to realize that this is a predatory adjustable rate loan that was originated under questionable circumstances and that if a further review was conducted of the paperwork it would indicate significant improprieties on the part of XXXX. There are major issues with this loan that is tied to our home and that makes it difficult for Ocwen and the investor to rightfully foreclose or insure title. For those reasons, as well as the fact that our financial circumstances have changed, Ocwen needs to work with us to resolve this matter.