Banks high on list of delinquent property owners

Two of the city’s top delinquent landlords are not landlords at all. They’re banks.


City officials said Wells Fargo & Co. and Bank of America owe more than $80,000 in fines for allowing many vacant properties in foreclosure to fall into disrepair and blight neighborhoods.

Yet both banks, two of the nation’s largest, question whether they are responsible for the properties and tickets. Wells Fargo representatives, for example, said they don’t even know if they own many of the homes; Wells Fargo could be servicing a foreclosure for another bank, or acting as a trustee for a giant pension fund that holds the mortgage.

“It is confusing as to why we’re being fined,” spokesman Tom Goyda said about citations issued to the bank.

The situation is another example of the problems created by the modern mortgage market, where loans are sliced, diced, and resold many times by banks and financial institutions, diffusing ownership and, ultimately, responsibility. Banks granted mortgages and sold them to other banks, which packaged them into securities  and sold them to investors, which then hired the same banks to collect the loans.

Now, with banks holding a record number of abandoned and foreclosed homes, many of those properties have become magnets for vandalism, arson, and drugs as banks and local officials try to sort out — and often dispute — who is responsible. Meanwhile, local government officials and taxpayers are left to clean up the mess.

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2011/04/15/2_major_banks_make_bostons_list_of_delinquent_property_owners/