Are banks and distressed home sellers getting rooked on a massive scale in the booming short-sale
arena — leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table for white-collar criminals?

A comprehensive new study estimates they will lose more than $375 million this year alone when they
sell undervalued houses to tag teams consisting of real estate agents and investors. Worse yet, the trend
appears to be growing at the rate of 25 percent a year.

CoreLogic, a large real estate and mortgage data research firm headquartered in Santa Ana, Calif.,
studied 450,000 short-sale transactions across the country during the past two years, and offered these
real-life examples of how lenders are losing big bucks: [more]

From the November issue: Mortgage broker and WPIX television show host Jeffrey Appel took a new
job at Bank of America last month after his former employer, Preferred
Empire Mortgage, was reconfigured in a joint venture with
California-based lender Wells Fargo Bank. Appel, now a vice president at Bank of America’s home lending
division, was a senior vice president at Preferred Empire Mortgage, a
mortgage brokerage owned by the city’s biggest residential real estate
brokerage, Prudential Douglas Elliman. In a past study, The Real Deal ranked Appel as one of the city’s top mortgage producers.
Preferred ceased operations as an entity in September and a new
company, DE Capital Mortgage, was created as a joint venture between
Prudential and Wells Fargo. Appel, who led a team of brokers that at
its height had seven members, said although he thought the joint
venture was a good decision, he opted to move to Bank of America on
Oct. 13.

The owners of the Bank of America Tower at One Bryant Park are expected to refinance the building Monday. The $1.275 billion loan is one of the biggest private financings since 2007. The money, which took building owners Durst Organization and Bank of America nine months to get, will be used to pay back a $950 million loan on the building, to repay investors and to finish work on the tower. Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Wells Fargo Bank, Westdeutsche ImmobilienBank and Helaba Bank are providing the financing. Douglas Durst, the Durst Organization’s chairman, said securing the financing for the tower was part of what allowed him to resign as the company’s co-president. He will stay on as chairman. [more]