Fighting Foreclosure
Jay Maes of Eau Claire is challenging his bank's foreclosure action against him in court. The single dad, who shares this Bergen Avenue home with his 6-year-old daughter Kayanna, hopes to get a loan modification and avoid joining the ranks of millions of Americans who have lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis.

When faced with the prospect of losing their homes through f...oreclosure, many homeowners just turn in their keys and walk out the door.
They figure a lone struggling mortgage holder has no chance in a showdown with a huge bank and its deep pockets and teams of lawyers.
Eau Claire residents Jay Maes and Bob Losby don't know each other, but they both know that feeling well. Yet what makes their cases stand out from the tens of thousands of foreclosure cases across Wisconsin is that neither man is willing to give up his home without a fight.
While the national foreclosure crisis has hit home - literally - for both men, Maes and Losby thus far have beaten the odds by managing to hang on to their properties. But both acknowledged it's incredibly stressful knowing that could change at any time.

"Some nights I can't sleep at all because of the stress," said Maes, 38, a single dad with joint custody who shares his Bergen Avenue home with his 6-year-old daughter Kayanna. "I worry that I will come home some night and the locks will be changed or my electricity will be turned off."
Just last week, Maes said, a messenger handed Kayanna a document requesting a call to a new mortgage service specialist in Colorado, forcing Maes to answer questions from his daughter about why giant banking company JP Morgan Chase wants their house.
Earlier this month Maes took the relatively rare step of appearing in court in a last-ditch attempt to stop his property from being sold at a sheriff's sale. Bank representatives failed to show up, and Eau Claire County Judge Michael Schumacher granted him a stay until early next month.

Though he considers the reprieve a victory, Maes understands it is only temporary, and the threat of losing his home still looms over his head day and night.
Experts say Maes' case, in which temporary financial distress led to a foreclosure action he hoped to remedy once he was back on his feet, is fairly typical of the millions of foreclosures working their way through the system.

Blindsided

Losby's situation, by contrast, is extremely unusual.

The 46-year-old construction worker has spent the past three years trying to stop a bank foreclosure on a refinanced mortgage he never signed and didn't know about until several months after it had been taken out by a former girlfriend.

Adding fuel to his desire to keep fighting, Losby has an emotional attachment to his red brick house beyond the fact that he calls it home. It has been in his family for four generations, and a framed portrait of his great-grandfather George J. Losby, who built the house on Third Avenue in 1928, still hangs above the mantel in the living room.

The trouble began in June 2005, when the ex-girlfriend, in need of cash for college and wedding expenses, sought to refinance the 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage through what Losby labeled a "predatory lender" she found on the Internet. The new lender charged an exorbitant $7,000 in fees for an adjustable-rate mortgage for about $40,000 more than the original mortgage, he said.

But the worst part, Losby said, is that documents show both the mortgage originator and the title company knew he owned half the house and still granted the loan without his signature.

To his horror, Losby, who had been making payments to his then-girlfriend for his half of the mortgage, could only watch as the ARM came due, the interest rate soared to 13 percent and the required payments more than doubled from the original loan's $1,100 a month. About a year later he learned the lender had launched foreclosure proceedings.

While several lawyers and title professionals have told him the lender's critical error of granting the new mortgage without his signature should put him in a strong position for his legal challenge, the harsh reality, after three years of fighting, is that he has accumulated nearly $30,000 in legal fees and still doesn't know how his ordeal will be resolved.

"The bank has just about beaten me into submission. I can't afford to fight anymore," said Losby, who saves money by only heating the house to about 52 degrees in winter.

Deutsche Bank, the third lender to own the second loan in a market in which reselling mortgages and servicing duties is rampant, didn't respond to a request for comment on the case. The bank has offered a small settlement that would cover part of Losby's legal fees, but he is holding out for a resolution that would allow him to keep his house.

"I know most people aren't getting anything, but I just don't want to let the two companies that did wrong off the hook," Losby said. "It was pure greed that led the banks down this road. To me, that's wrong. That's the way I was raised."

Frustrating process

Maes acknowledged he fell behind on his mortgage payments after he was laid off from a job at Hutchinson Technology Inc. in March 2009, just four months after draining his savings to make the down payment on his humble north side home, which cost less than $100,000.

But he insisted that, once eligible and re-employed as a dental technician, he tried to satisfy all of a loan servicing agent's verbal conditions for getting a loan modification and a fresh start.

But it was to no avail, as the bank initiated foreclosure proceedings anyway.

JP Morgan Chase spokeswoman Christine Holevas said Friday the bank is "taking another look at Mr. Maes' case to determine what he can do to regain the property."

For Maes, an Elk Mound native who has lived in Eau Claire for 18 years, it's hard to get his hopes up because the two-year fight has been marked by paperwork snafus and an impending sense that losing his house is inevitable.

"It's really a piss-poor process," he said. "A lot of people just give up and walk away, and I can't blame them because every time they turn around they face another roadblock."